Answers/Glossary/Musical composition
Glossary · Copyright
Musical composition
A musical composition is the song itself — the melody, harmony, structure and lyrics — protected as its own copyright separate from any recording of it. Its owners are the songwriters and their publishers, and it earns performance and mechanical royalties.
The musical composition is the abstract work. It exists before anyone records it and it survives every recording of it. When a hundred artists cover a song, there is one composition and a hundred sound recordings, and the composition's writers are paid on every single one of them.
Under US law the composition is the subject of its own copyright, owned initially by the people who wrote it. Its identifier is the ISWC, its performance income is collected by ASCAP, BMI, SESAC or GMR, and its US digital mechanical income is collected by The MLC. Sync licences to use a song in film or television require permission from the composition owners, separately from permission to use any particular recording.
For a bedroom producer who writes, performs, records and releases alone, all of this can feel like bureaucratic hair-splitting, because the same person owns both copyrights. It stops feeling academic the first time you look at a royalty statement and realise your distributor's number only ever reflected one of the two. The composition side has its own registrations, its own organisations and its own money, and none of it arrives because your recording is on Spotify.
Splits live at the composition level. When two people write a song, they divide the composition, and a split sheet is what records the division. Ownership of the recording is a separate question that can land differently.
The misunderstanding: assuming that owning the master means you own everything. If you rapped over a beat someone else made, the composition may well be co-owned even when the recording is entirely yours.
I write and record my own material and learned this the slow way; not legal advice.
Related terms
- Sound recordingA sound recording is the fixed capture of a performance — the master — protected as its own copyright separate from the…
- Two copyrightsEvery released song contains two separate copyrights: the musical composition, owned by the songwriters and publishers, and the…
- PublishingPublishing is the business of owning and exploiting musical compositions — the songs themselves, not the recordings.
- ISWCAn ISWC, International Standard Musical Work Code, is a unique identifier for a musical composition, formatted as T followed by…
Answers that use this term
- What Is a Mechanical Royalty, and Who Pays It?A mechanical royalty is the money owed for reproducing a musical composition — copying the song, not the recording.
- What Is a Performance Royalty, and Who Collects It?A performance royalty is money owed when a musical composition is performed publicly — on streaming, radio, television, in a bar…
Definitions on this site describe the United States system. I am an artist who has been through this, not a lawyer.
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