bassboom88

I'm in a band and we are finally recording our music. The guitarist is ultra paranoid, super petrified of our music being stolen or taken and he's wanting to do everything to protect our stuff. I'm not worried at all about anyone taking our music. He's under the impression that there are active thieves out and about waiting for new musicians to release music and to just take it. He believes in the myths. Last year we tried recording our songs properly and I just ran into a lot of issues with them not wanting to do stuff and record right. The guitarist wanted us to get our stuff protected immediately so what we ended up doing was a complete waste of time. In our lockout room last year we set up 1 microphone and we played our songs. The recordings are god awful and should never see the light of day. They were just to copyright them. Well we get them done and the guitarist was saying that we actually don't need to submit them because it would cost $270 or $300 and the fact we recorded them in a tangible form means they are under legal copyright. So I'm thinking we just wasted all that time recording in an unprofessional manner and we cannot use these recordings for anything. I don't know what he was reading and where he got those dollar amounts but I have not found those figures anywhere, so I'm glad we didn't spend that money. But it's just so frustrating we did all that work for nothing essentially. The recordings are very poor quality.

Fast forward to right now. We have finally recorded 1 song properly, after a lot of wasted time and discussions about what to do, we have 1 song done. We are doing everything wrong it seems like. Now he is doing an internship at a studio and wanting his coworkers and even his boss to work on our 1 song. He is saying that none of them will touch our song unless it is registered with the copyright office, but that doesn't make sense to me. I've never heard a sound/audio engineer refusing to work on a song because it isn't registered. Has anyone heard of that?

Second, he wants to register about 15 of our songs but use our really crappy god awful versions which no one should ever hear. Most of those were made last year and since then we've actually tweaked several songs and changed things up. So if we register a song that was recorded last year, does that mean the current version we play, the newer version that hasn't been recorded yet, is not protected and we'd have to record that current version and get that one also registered to protect it? On top of that I am certainly not looking to release all of these songs. I'm not even wanting to properly record all 15, I just wanna get 3 songs out there and move on. We don't even play all of these songs. We've stopped practicing about 4 of them. So what's the point?

I totally agree that registering is a good idea. It isn't required as far as I have read but it's just the safe route and in case you go to court, it holds more weight. But i don't wanna spend money registering music that is never going to be published. I'd rather just record the songs that we are going to release and publish, and then register those. But he is saying we have to do it immediately so that audio engineers can work on our 1 song.

Anyone have any advice, any knowledge on this stuff, any insights? Many will probably think I should just get out of this band since we're wasting time and not going anywhere, which is what I'm going to do, I was just hoping to actually get a couple recordings out of this band, because I've been looking for other musicians to start a new band but everyone wants to hear recordings. My band has been around for 15 months and have nothing to show for it. And the reason I'm gonna leave the band is because we aren't recording our stuff and taking the proper steps.

The Batlord

Bruh, just use Google.

https://www.wikihow.com/Copyright-a-Song

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Guybrush

I haven't googled, and perhaps that would give better advice, but we'd record, mix and master everything without worrying about copyrighting. As far as I know, you automatically have the copyright to the original songs you yourself write. We haven't considered it to be an issue.

We've considered registering songs with Tono, a company that manages the rights of songwriters / copyright-holders in this country, but the goal then would be so that we can collect royalties from radio plays etc. Until then, we only make money for streaming (a negligible amount of cash for us).

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Something Completely Different

Ninetales

this is true, but it's proving this in court that would be difficult without documentation

the other thing to note though is that it would be even more difficult/unlikely to a) lift part or all of an unreleased unregistered song from someone else and then b) make actual money off of that song

unless you guys are local heroes I doubt this would matter