You wrote a song, recorded it, released it, and filed a copyright application so it would be protected. Reasonable, and it is where most independent filings go wrong, because a recorded song is not one copyright.
It is at least two. They are separate applications, on separate fees, with different authors. Which one you filed decides what you can actually stop someone doing.
This is not legal advice. We are a music label, not a law firm. This is written from filing our own catalogue. If money or a dispute is involved, talk to an IP lawyer.
The two copyrights
| Musical work | Sound recording | |
|---|---|---|
| Protects | the composition, and, in practice, the lyrics with it | that specific recorded master |
| Author is | the composer, and the lyricist alongside them | the producer, which is a defined term |
| Fee | charged per work | charged per work, several times higher |
Register only the musical work and you own the song but not the record. Your master is unprotected. Register only the sound recording and someone can lawfully re-record your composition note for note and owe you nothing.
Two consequences people miss:
The author is a different person on each form. The Act defines “author” separately for each class of work, so the two applications for one song should not normally carry identical author columns. For a sound recording, “producer” is a legal term that rarely means the person credited as producer on the release, and on our own filings, that column is the one that has drawn a query. That distinction has its own post.
The definition of “musical work” excludes the words, but the filing doesn’t. Section 2(p) defines a musical work as the music and says it “does not include any words … intended to be sung”, which makes the lyrics a literary work with the lyricist as its author under section 2(d)(i).
Read that on its own and you would conclude the lyricist has no place on a musical work application. In practice that is not how it comes back. On our own granted certificates the registered work is described as consisting of lyrics and musical composition, and where a song had a separate lyricist, the lyricist is named as an author on the certificate alongside the composer.
So: name everyone who wrote the song. The statutory definition explains why the deposit copy matters. It is not a reason to leave a writer off the form.
Where filings actually fail
Not on the form. On four things around it:
The deed. The assignments and consents from everyone who contributed. This is what decides whether an application registers, and it is where the expensive mistakes live.
The physical packet. Filing online is half of it. There is a 30-day clock, a list of mandatory enclosures, and a service-by-post requirement almost nobody knows about.
Reading the portal. An empty screen proves nothing, and one status that sounds alarming is not.
The two classes behave differently. Sound recording filings are the harder of the two, and they attract more queries. That gets its own treatment under Sound Recording; the composition side is under Musical Work.
If you take one thing
Decide who the author is for each filing before you touch the form. Get the paperwork from every contributor signed properly, with duration and territory written into it. Then diarise the physical packet the day you submit.
Everything after that is queueing, and queueing is normal.
Working through this and seeing something that does not match? We would like to know, get in touch.