Did you know that when you write and record a song that you own two distinct things? Well if you didn’t know, you in fact do. Let’s say you sit down with your notebook of lyric ideas and start to sketch out the different elements for a full song. You get your story angle developed, you frame your lyric structure, craft the words to tell your future song’s story, square away the rhyme scheme, and so on. 
Lyrics be done! Guess what, you’ve already just established ownership over part of a song. You own a copyright! Then you grab your guitar and put those lyrics to an awesome melody that you are able to sing over the most appropriate chord progression. You now write down your chord progression and notate your melody line & lyric. The lyric copyright you initially had is now expanded to include both music & lyrics. This copyright you own is for the complete songwriting of your next big hit. You are now self-published songwriter! You can call yourself a publisher now because a publisher is the owner of a song copyright.
Now, you could go and sell this song right now if you wanted to. It’s complete songwriting. Someone could buy it and record it. What’s that? You’re an artist and want to record it yourself? Sounds like a plan. So you head into your bedroom studio and lay down the tracks of the song. You record yourself performing the vocals and guitar, maybe you get your buddy to play bass and your girlfriend to knock out the drums, because it finally pays off that you’ve put up with dating a drummer who likes to rehearse at 3AM. But I digress….. Anyhow, you’ve got all the parts recorded, you mix them down, slap your mastering plug-ins on it and spit out your final AIF of the hit that will change your life. Now 
guess what? You now own copyright #2, the one for the recorded performance of your self-published song. You know who usually owns the copyright of a recording of a song? A label. Yup, the dastardly labels. But it’s okay, because you are now your own record label so you can only be mad at yourself for signing yourself to your own 360 deal. Crap, I digress again.
Anyhoo, the point is that if you are an artist who writes and records your own material, you always own 2 distinct copyrights. Each of these copyrights can be monetized separately or together, as the case may be. Maybe you want to be a songwriter and have other recording artists cover your songs on their records. That’s what a publisher does as the owner and administrator of songwriting. Maybe you want to sell your songs to the public and keep the bulk of the profits (minus the 9.1¢ mechanical royalties due to the writer/publisher of a song but that’s another article entirely). That’s what a record label does as the owner and administrator of recordings.
Finally , to illustrate the difference in the copyrights, take a placement on film or television. When a song is used, there are always two licenses that a production has to secure. The synchronization license for the songwriting, which is secured from the publisher as owner of the song, and the master use license for the actual recorded performance of that song, which is secured from the label as owner of the recording. Both licenses have to be secured for a song to be in a film or show.
So there ya have it. As an independent artist, you always own 2 copyrights and are both publisher and record label until you enter an agreement with a 3rd party for one or the other or both. Copyrights……sport of the future!
by Marc Caruso