Speaker 1: So your song's finished, you're ready to publish it, but here are some things that you gotta get done first. Let's get to work.

Speaker 2: Jimmy, Jimmy, make music, make music, make music, make music.

Speaker 1: So many people think that once you're done recording a song, you just throw it onto a digital distributor and everything's gravy. Everything's done, that's all you gotta do. But that's not it, man. If you're doing this stuff for yourself as an independent, you got some paperwork to do. There are other means to get paid off your music other than doing live shows. Of course, there's a million ways you can promote your stuff, but you gotta get your paperwork right. Otherwise, you're promoting your songs and you're not gonna get paid. One of the first things you wanna do is get your song registered with your PRO, or your Performing Rights Organization. These are organizations like ASCAP, BMI, or SESAC that take care of your radio royalties and your sync licensing royalties. So if you get placements anywhere on a TV show, an app, a game, anything like that, they'll collect royalties for you. The one I personally use is ASCAP, or the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers. But feel free to research these organizations. There's two major ones in the United States. It's ASCAP or BMI. They all have their plus and minuses, but all essentially do the same thing. If you don't have an account already, I definitely recommend signing up as a writer and a publisher so that you get full royalties for your songs. There is a one-time application fee for whatever type of account you're signing up for. The writer's and publisher's account is $100, and you're done. There's no recurring fees. They just pay you now. Or collect money for you, anyway. Super simple off the bat. You're gonna register a new work. I'm not gonna go in-depth with this, but you will put all the writer's names and their ASCAP information or BMI information in these sections here, along with their publishers. Now, if you don't necessarily have a publisher, you are the publisher. If you don't have an official publisher, it's not a big deal. Make one up for yourself. I recommend starting an LLC or an S-Corp or whatever type of business you want to start. At the very least, you want a doing business as company name. Simply so you can set up a business bank account to get your stuff separated from your personal bank account. So you got your song registered with your PRO. The next thing you want to do is hit the copyright office. Right on copyright.gov, you're gonna make an account. It's called an eco account or echo account, I think they call it. And it's all very simple on this site. There are a lot of tutorials on this site to help you get through the system and learn what applications you need. In music copyright, there are two different types of applications. One's for the lyrics and the melody, and one's for the actual sound recording. Usually, the sound recording copyright will be suffice enough for you. But if you want that extra protection for your lyrics and your melody of the song, you're gonna want to get that second copyright too. The next thing you're gonna want to do is set up your song or album with your digital distributor. Because they're gonna give you the numbers that you need to plug into some other sites. Like your UPCs and your ISRCs. Let me show you what I mean. Here's the back office of my distributor. Let's look at this instrumental album that I put out. And you'll see my UPC for the album is here. And the ISRC for the songs are here. For each song, they'll have their own identifying number. Once you have the UPC numbers and the ISRC numbers, you're gonna be good to go. So now I'm gonna take these numbers and go back to my ASCAP account. And go to the song, So Apart. Inside the information of the song, there's all kinds of data you can put in. The most important are identifying numbers like UPCs and ISRCs. You'll go into the Performers and Other Info tab. And you will plug this information in. You can always change this information. So say hypothetically, I just got my UPC numbers or my ISRC numbers. I can plug them in here. See how this number will match this number? Good to go. I can add performers. Any other information pertaining to the track, you can add too. A lot of this is just covering all the bases. You're not gonna use a lot of this information. The most important things are the writers, the publishers, and any kind of ISRC or UPC code that they need. Once I add or edit anything, I'm just gonna save it or submit it. Now all your performing rights organization info is good to go and in sync with your digital distributor. The next thing you want to do is give your song and or album information to SoundScan. Now SoundScan really works in conjunction with Billboard. If you want your song on the charts or any type of chart, this will keep track of it for you. All the links to these websites will be down in the description. So you can just come back to this video and use it as a reference. Now when you're registering with SoundScan, there are two different options. One is for a single and one is for your album. If you're just putting out a single, then it's really no big deal. Just make sure the top of the page that you're on says ISRC registration. This is for a single. And you're just going to put in the appropriate information and then verify and submit. Now the SoundScan for your album will look very similar. On the top it'll say title registration and it will want your album information. You're going to want to plug in all the information that they need. The UPC or the European code, the EAN, whichever your distributor uses. It's really that simple. Verify and submit and you're good to go with SoundScan. The last thing that's often overlooked these days is registering your song with BDS and MediaBase. These are companies that will detect when your song is played on the radio. Now don't just write off terrestrial radio like it doesn't exist anymore because this is what a lot of labels that are looking for artists look at. This type of data of who's getting spins where. And it's free for you to upload to these websites so you might as well do it. Making an account is free and uploading is super simple. You literally just put in the title and the artist and upload the song. It gets encoded into their system and every time it's played on the radio it's detected. It's valuable information for you as an independent because you can set up an account with BDS to track your spins. What you do with that information can be all kinds of different stuff. You can see what city's playing your song more and then go tour there. If you're trying to get signed you can reach out with that data to different labels and say look I got these spins here. I'm making moves. Let's work something out. A service very similar to BDS is MediaBase. MediaBase is the same type of principle. It's going to track your spins for you on terrestrial radio, regular radio. If I'm not mistaken MediaBase is still a clear channel or an iHeartRadio company which is the biggest radio company in the world. So you want to definitely get them your track information. It's all very simple. You put in all the appropriate information, upload your song and submit it. It's simple as that. Now that's most of your admin work done. I'm sure there's a ton of other things that you could try to look into. I'm sure there's other companies that'll track royalties for you from different services. But these are the basic services you want to get familiar with before you start exploring those other options. Now you have your UPCs, your ISRCs, you're registered with your PRO. Now you can really start making moves with the track and maybe reach out to some licensing companies and get on TV, get on apps, get on games. If you get into music licensing, simply just google music licensing companies and you'll see all these different types of music licensing opportunities. Whether it's stock music or background music or working with a company exclusively for different placements. You have all your back-end paperwork ready to go. Now you're even ready for some radio promotion. If you look into something like Play MPE, maybe they can help you out getting more of a radio push. If you're going to work with any of these companies, it's good to have all your back-end admin work ready to go. Well, I hope this video helped you out. If it did, leave me a like, comment below on ways that you get your back office straight before you publish a song. Until the next one guys, peace.