Answers/Royalties/Should You Register a Song Before or After You Release It?

Royalties

Should You Register a Song Before or After You Release It?

By Boboy Watson·Last verified August 31, 2026·2,149 words·Royalties

The instinct is to wait. Release the song, see whether it does anything, and deal with the boring paperwork if it turns into something worth the effort.

That instinct is backwards, and it is expensive in a way you cannot see until much later. Every registration I have ever done late cost me more work than the same registration would have cost done early, and at least one of them cost me money I never recovered.

Why does the timing matter at all?

Royalties accrue from first public play, not from registration.

The moment a song goes live on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube, it starts generating performance royalties on the composition and mechanical royalties on the reproduction. Those royalties are attributed to whoever the registration says owns the work. If ASCAP or BMI has no registration for the work, the performance is logged against a work with no writer attached. If The MLC has no registration, the mechanical is collected and held as unmatched.

So the gap between release day and registration day is a window where a song earns money into a pool you are not connected to. Nothing dramatic happens at the end of that window. The money simply sits somewhere that is not your account, waiting for a claim you have to go and make.

What can you register before a song is released?

Almost all of it. The composition exists as a work the moment it is written, which means the registrations that matter most do not depend on the release at all.

The only genuinely after-the-fact item is Content ID, and I would argue for being careful with that one anyway if your track leans on widely used loops.

Does the ISRC block anything?

No, and this is where the sequencing quietly works in your favour. Your distributor issues the ISRC for each track when you upload the release, not when the release goes public. DistroKid, TuneCore and CD Baby all assign identifiers at upload and display them in the release details.

That means the normal two-to-four week delivery lead time hands you the ISRC before the public release date. You can put the ISRC into your MLC work registration and your SoundExchange recording list while the song is still scheduled and unreleased, which is exactly the state you want on release day: full registrations, complete identifiers, nothing pending.

Registering the composition with ASCAP, BMI or The MLC does not require the ISRC in the first place — those organisations are registering the work, not the recording — but including it improves matching, so use the window rather than fighting it.

What is the deadline for registering copyright with the US Copyright Office?

This is the one true deadline in the whole process, and most independent artists have never heard of it.

Under 17 U.S.C. 412, statutory damages and attorney's fees are only available to a copyright owner if the work was registered before the infringement began, or within three months of first publication. Register later than that and you can still sue, but your recovery is limited to actual damages and the infringer's profits — which for a small independent release is often not worth the cost of a lawsuit, meaning in practice you have no realistic remedy at all.

The fees, per the US Copyright Office fee schedule retrieved August 2026:

GRAM at $65 for an entire album is the number worth remembering. Registering twelve tracks individually under the Single Application would be $540; the album group registration covers the same material for $65. If you release in album or EP batches, the copyright registration is close to a rounding error against the cost of the release itself.

What does registering after release actually cost you?

Register before release:

• Every play from day one is attributed to you at ASCAP or BMI and matched at The MLC
• One pass through the forms, done calmly, with your splits already agreed
• No claiming process, no evidence to assemble, no support tickets
• The Copyright Office three-month window is comfortably met

Register after release:

• The pre-registration window is handled through claiming processes at each organisation
• Those processes are slower, differ per organisation, and are not guaranteed to recover everything
• Unmatched mechanicals sit at The MLC until somebody claims them
• You do the same forms plus the cleanup work

The forms are identical either way. Doing them first is strictly cheaper. There is no scenario where waiting produces a better outcome — it is one of the rare decisions in this business with a genuinely correct answer.

What happens to royalties on an unregistered song?

They still get collected. That is the part people get wrong: nobody stops charging Spotify because your paperwork is incomplete.

On the composition side, Spotify pays the mechanical to The MLC whether or not the work is registered. The MLC matches that usage against registered works, and anything it cannot match is held as unmatched royalty pending a claim. On the performance side, ASCAP and BMI license the service and collect the performance royalty, but a performance of a work with no registration has no writer or publisher to distribute to.

Nothing about this is malicious and none of it is a trap. It is simply a matching system, and an unregistered work is a row in a usage report with nothing to match against.

Should you wait to see if a song takes off?

The reasoning sounds fiscally careful: why do the paperwork for a song nobody hears?

The problem is that you cannot predict which one moves, and the song that moves is precisely the one where the unregistered window costs the most. A track that quietly does nothing costs you nothing in unclaimed royalties. A track that catches a Spotify editorial playlist in month two, while unregistered, is the expensive case — and by the time you know which kind you have, the window has already happened. Worse, the fast-moving song is also the one where the pressure to fix the paperwork arrives at the least convenient moment.

You are not doing the paperwork because the song is valuable. You are doing it because you do not get to know in advance.

The registration is cheap insurance on an outcome you cannot forecast. Skipping it only ever looks smart on the songs that failed.

How far ahead should you actually start?

Two weeks before the release date is enough for a song, provided your accounts already exist. If they do not, start a month out, because account setup is the part with unpredictable delays.

The specific thing that catches people is the publisher name. BMI and ASCAP both check a proposed publishing company name against existing affiliated companies, and a rejection means picking another name and resubmitting. That is a days-to-weeks loop, not a minutes loop, and it is a bad thing to discover on release week. BMI is also explicit that a new songwriter "will not need to set up a publishing company" and that creating one does not increase royalties — so if the publisher entity is what is blocking you, affiliate as a writer, register the work, and deal with the publishing company later.

What is a realistic pre-release registration sequence?

Roughly two to four weeks out, in this order:

1. Confirm your PRO accounts exist — writer, and publisher if you have one. BMI writer affiliation is free; ASCAP is $50 for the writer account. If a publisher name approval is pending, do not let it hold up the writer-side registration.
2. Sign the split sheet with every collaborator, before anyone has a reason to argue about it, and before you type percentages into a registration form.
3. Upload the release to your distributor with a scheduled date two to four weeks out. This is what generates the ISRC and UPC you will use everywhere else.
4. Register the work with ASCAP or BMI — writers, publishers, splits, ISRC where the form takes it.
5. Register the work with The MLC — free, and it is the pot with no fallback collector. Payment runs roughly 75 days after the end of each monthly usage period, so early registration also means earlier first payment.
6. Add the recordings to SoundExchange with their ISRCs, registering as both featured artist and rights owner if you self-release.
7. File with the US Copyright Office — Single Application at $45 for a standalone single, or GRAM at $65 if the track is part of an album batch. Within three months of publication at the latest.

Distribution is step three, not step one, and copyright is a deadline rather than an afterthought. That reordering is the whole lesson.

Does my distributor register my songs for me?

No distributor registers your compositions as part of standard distribution. DistroKid, TuneCore and CD Baby deliver recordings to Spotify, Apple Music and the rest, and they collect the sound recording royalty. The composition side — ASCAP or BMI for performance, The MLC for US mechanicals — is a separate registration you make yourself.

DistroKid Publishing is a paid add-on rather than part of the $24.99/yr Musician plan, and DistroKid's own help documentation describes what it collects as "different from your usual streaming royalties, which DistroKid already collects for all members". It also matters whether you are PRO-affiliated: DistroKid states that for affiliated writers it collects both the publisher and songwriter shares, and for unaffiliated writers it collects the publisher share only. That is another argument for having the BMI or ASCAP account in place before the release rather than after it.

CD Baby sells its own bundle of publishing and SoundExchange registration as an add-on to the $9.99 single or $14.99 album fee. Whatever you use, read what the add-on actually covers, because "my distributor handles publishing" is the single most expensive assumption in independent music.

What about registering a cover song before release?

A cover has an extra step, and it happens before release rather than after. Releasing someone else's composition commercially in the United States requires a mechanical licence under Section 115 of the Copyright Act, which is a compulsory licence — the copyright owner cannot refuse you — but it is not automatic and it is not free.

In practice you obtain it through a licensing service before the release goes out. The Harry Fox Agency has historically issued these, and DistroKid sells cover song licensing as a per-cover annual add-on. What you are paying for is the right to reproduce the composition; the recording is yours.

Registration order for a cover is different from an original in one respect: you are not the writer, so you do not register the work with ASCAP, BMI or The MLC as a songwriter. You register the recording, you clear the composition, and the writer's royalties go to whoever actually wrote it.

What if you are already behind on registrations?

Most people reading this have a back catalogue that went out unregistered. That was me too — years of it.

Do not let the size of the cleanup stop you from closing the leak. Register your accounts today so that nothing new goes out unclaimed, then work backwards through the existing catalogue when you have an afternoon. Newest and best-performing songs first, because that is where the recoverable money actually is, and because The MLC's matching improves once the works with real usage are registered.

The catalogue cleanup is a weekend. The leak is permanent until you close it. Those are not the same job, and doing the second one badly is still better than doing neither.

I am an artist who has been through this, not a lawyer or an accountant. Claiming rules and fees change — check each organisation's current process, and talk to a music attorney before relying on anything here in a dispute.