Registering Your Copyright Before Your Drop

Someone asked whether DirectDisc handles copyright registration for artists, the way some manufacturers advertise. Short answer: no, and I’d be a little suspicious of anyone who tells you a CD pressing service is also your publishing administrator. Those are two different jobs. Here’s what you actually need to know before your drop goes live, and where to go do it.

You already own it. Registration is a different thing.

Here’s the part that trips people up: your song is copyrighted the moment you record or write it down. You don’t need to file anything for that to be true. What registration actually gets you is the ability to do something about it — sue for infringement, collect statutory damages, prove a filing date if a dispute ever comes up. Nobody presses their first EP thinking about lawsuits. But registering is cheap, it’s fast, and it’s the kind of thing that’s annoying to do later and easy to do now, before your album drop is open for presale.

Two copyrights, not one

This is the part that actually causes problems, so worth being precise about it:

  • The recording (the actual audio file) — usually owned by you, if it’s your own recording.
  • The composition (the song underneath — lyrics, melody) — owned by whoever wrote it.

If you wrote and recorded the song yourself, you own both, and you’re clear. If you’re pressing a cover song, you only own the recording — the composition still belongs to its writer, and you need a mechanical license before you can legally press and sell physical copies of someone else’s song. This isn’t optional, and it’s not something DirectDisc can clear for you. The mechanical license is usually the easiest part to forget, because everything else about a cover feels finished the second the recording’s done.

Where to actually register

  • U.S. Copyright Office — file through their online system (eCO), roughly $45–65 per work. Processing takes a few months, but your protection dates back to when you filed, not when the certificate arrives. Do this for the recording.
  • A performing rights organization (ASCAP, BMI, or SESAC) — if you wrote the song, register there too. This is how you actually collect songwriter royalties down the line, and joining is usually free or low-cost.
  • Mechanical licensing, for covers — this is a separate license from a whole separate process (historically through the Harry Fox Agency, now often the Mechanical Licensing Collective for U.S. releases). If you’re covering someone else’s song, sort this out before you submit your drop, not after.

None of this is complicated once you know it exists. It’s just easy to not know it exists.

Why do this before the drop, not after

Your drop already gives you a natural window — the time between submitting your release and your closing date is exactly when this paperwork should happen, not after albums ship. Registration doesn’t block your drop from launching, but it’s a lot less fun to sort out once you’re mid-fulfillment and trying to remember whether you actually cleared that B side cover song.

Where DirectDisc fits into this — and where it doesn’t

DirectDisc presses your CDs. It doesn’t administer your publishing, collect your mechanical royalties, or register anything on your behalf, and I’d rather tell you that plainly than have you assume it’s handled. What we do ask, when you submit a drop, is that you confirm you actually hold the rights to what you’re pressing — which is a lot easier to confirm honestly once you’ve done the steps above.

If you want a service that does handle publishing administration end to end, that’s a real, legitimate thing full-service distributors offer — just know it’s a different kind of company doing a different job than the one pressing your discs.

Ready to submit your release? Start planning your drop → Or back up and read how CD pre-order drops work.

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