How Every Songwriter Should Get Their Sh*t Together

So, you consider yourself to be a budding songwriter. Great. Welcome to the club. (I’ve been writing songs, whatever that means nowadays or even back when I started in my teens, on and off for most of my adult life.) You’ve written a bunch of songs. Whether they’re going to be for your own project, or you’re going to take them to Nashville or New York (the former location might be the better bet, since every major publishing company seems to be based there now, regardless of what genres they handle) isn’t the issue here. The issue is how you’re going to get your shit together.

Here’s the scenario: You’ve written a bunch of songs, strummed them into a four-track cassette portastudio that you bought at a pawn shop somewhere, mixed them onto another cassette or a CD, and you need to protect them. So, you take a copy of your demo CD, put it in an envelope, and mail to yourself so that you can get a “poor man’s copyright” and put the tape away in a box in a closet (or a drawer in your bedroom) until that time when you decide you have to sue somebody for plagiarism.

Nope. Let’s be honest — the poor man’s copyright doesn’t really work. There’s no cases on record where a poor man’s copyright actually defended someone’s hard work. This means that you’re going to have to pony up a few bucks to the US Copyright Office to get your songs…