Copyright is a very important consideration when writing music, whether you are collaborating or not. It is your responsibility to make sure you are complying with copyright rules.

If you want to release music and earn royalties from it, you should consider joining a professional organisation, such as:

APRA AMCOS in Australia (the Australasian Performing Right Association and Australasian Mechanical Copyright Owners Society)
ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) or SESAC in the United States.

Find out which organisations or 'copyright collectives' operate in your country and see what information they provide on copyright considerations. The APRA AMCOS website, for example, provides useful information on copyright and collaborative songwriting.

Song Split Sheet

If you are collaborating with others, consider filling out this song split sheet together to clarify ownership of the song. (It's a good exercise even if you don't expect to ever make any money from the song and just split everything evenly between all contributors!)

songsplitsheet.doc

Walkthrough video

In the following video, the course guides discuss copyright, licensing and royalties in the context of collaborative songwriting and consider some of the decisions they will have to make about the copyright for their song.

16 ¹/₂ mins

Expert insights

In the following videos, our industry experts talk about their own experiences with music copyright and share their advice for navigating the copyright space.

		Rodney Holder 1 ¹/₂ mins How aware of copyright issues should a song writer be?

		Will Larsen (clip 1) 1 ¹/₂ mins How might you deal with copyright issues?

		Will Larsen (clip 2) ¹/₂ min Are there copyright issues when remixing or rearranging?

		Aylin Eser ¹/₂ min Do you think about copyright when you are writing songs?

		Bruce Butler 7 mins How important is an awareness of copyright issues for artists? What issues can arise in relation to copyright and how can these be avoided?

		Ross McLennan 3 mins How important is copyright?