The following below are the simple steps to find the song copyright owners or publishers. As a background, you need to perform a copyright search to get the following information:
a.) Copyright owner/songwriter of the song.
b.) Music publisher of the song
The reason why most music consumers are performing a copyright search is that they would like to ask for permission to use a certain song in their projects. Asking permission also means that you are asking license from the music publisher.
One important information that you need to know is that if the song is not represented by a major music publisher or any music publisher, the songwriter automatically acts in behalf as the music publisher and can issue licenses or grant you permissions.
Otherwise if the songwriter is signed to a music publisher, then you need to get permission from the music publisher representing the songwriter.
Searching this information can be daunting at times. And the steps illustrated in this tutorial are one of the simplest methods you can employ without hiring or spending anything in your copyright search.
The major steps in the Copyright Search
Step 1: You must know at least the song title and the performing artist. All songs you need to search should have this information. These are used as stepping stones on the way on knowing the song publisher/ copyright owner.
Step 2: Now you know the song title and performing artist. You need to do a Google search using this syntax:
“song title” + “performing artist” + “songwriter”
For example if I would like to know the song copyright owner (the songwriter/publisher) for the song “All by myself” by Celine Dion. Below is the information I would like to enter in Google search box.
Doing Google Search in Copyright Search
Step 3: Now that Google provided the search results, it is time to use some common sense. See the screenshot below:
Search result
The 1st result is the Wikipedia Celine Dion page; of course it will not contain information about the song particularly the songwriter. The second result is more important and is the one you need, because looking at the description provided by Google, it provides facts about the song specifically containing songwriter information (Eric Carmen).
For more details and confirmation, open up this relevant result and check if it’s “Eric Carmen” as the assigned songwriter for this song.
Step 4: Now that you know Eric Carmen is the one that wrote the song, you can do another rounds of Google search, now focusing on the song details. For example:
“Eric Carmen” + “All by Myself”.
The top and the most important result are:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_by_Myself
Open up this page in your browser and examine the provided information on this Wikipedia page.
Step 5: Finally the song revealed the following information:
Song title: All by Myself
Songwriter: Eric Carmen, Sergei Rachmaninoff
Eric Carmen is from United States while Sergei Rachmaninoff is from Russia. If you read their biographies, you will find out that Eric Carmen is still alive and you would need to obtain contact information to be used further on the copyright search.
However, the main objective of knowing the writer is to contact the music publisher of the song. It is because they are the one that can officially grant you a license and not the songwriter.
One tip is to contact these performing right societies’ website since they might list the songs as well as the songwriter and the music publisher name:
Detailed research reveals that Eric Carmen is BMI affiliated writer and the song “All by Myself” has a BMI work of 20362.
BMI song result
Finally, clicking on the “All by Myself” link reveals the name of the music publishers representing the song. See the screenshot below:
BMI complete listing with music publishers
What to do next?
OK now you know the music publishers of this song (there are two publishers listed); you would then need to follow the last remaining steps:
1.) Search the music publisher website in Google. You can do this by simply searching their music publisher name and most likely the top result is their official website.
2.) Use their website contact forms to make a licensing inquiry.
3.) The music publisher would then reply to you with licensing form asking detailed information how you are going to use their song.
4.) You would need to fill up that information as accurate as you can and return it to them.
5.) They will review the information, if they approve the use of the song they will grant you license. In some aspects you also require to pay some licensing fees.
6.) Everything will be finalized in a licensing agreement which you and music publisher would be signing.
Content last updated on June 28, 2012