Do you own the master if you paid the producer?
25 · · 14 min read · Español
Probably not, and it has probably not mattered yet. Under United States law, paying for a recording buys the producer’s work and, in most cases, an unwritten licence to release it — it does not buy the copyright, which stays with the recording’s authors until somebody signs it away. Canada answers the same question from the other end, and can reach the opposite result. What the payment did buy is worth knowing precisely, because it runs out at the exact moment your catalogue becomes worth something.
- Payment alone transfers no copyright, and owning the files a recording arrives in is not owning the recording.
- A recording made at your request, delivered to you, and meant to be released is very likely covered by an implied nonexclusive licence — the Ninth Circuit’s test, not a provision of the Copyright Act.
- An implied licence paid for is not revocable at will, and it is still not ownership.
- Without the copyright you cannot grant exclusivity, sue an infringer, stop the producer licensing the recording elsewhere, or sell it with clean title.
- Canada gives the copyright in a sound recording to its maker — the person who undertook the arrangements necessary for the first fixation of the sounds.
What did the money actually buy?
The producer’s work, the files it arrived in, and — in most cases — permission to release the recording. Not the copyright.
Start with the part that is settled, because most of the confusion lives in it. Section 202 of the Copyright Act:
Ownership of a copyright, or of any of the exclusive rights under a copyright, is distinct from ownership of any material object in which the work is embodied. Transfer of ownership of any material object, including the copy or phonorecord in which the work is first fixed, does not of itself convey any rights in the copyrighted work embodied in the object.
The statute is talking about discs and tapes. The mistake it names is the one everybody makes over a folder of stems: the hand-off felt like the transaction closing, and it was not the transaction at all. “I paid for it, so it’s mine” is the most expensive bullshit in this business, and the invoice is why it survives — it looks exactly like a receipt for a thing.
Whether the producer ends up a co-author of the master, and what a work-for-hire clause does and does not do about it, is a whole piece of its own. Read it if you have not. This one starts one step later, with the deal you actually made.
Three shapes, and people call all of them “paying the producer.” A flat fee for the session. A fee plus points on what the recording earns. Or a producer keeping a slice of the master itself, which is a different deal and a real one, and which somebody should have written down at the time.
Only the third of those was ever about ownership. None of the three is settled by the credit anybody takes either. The first two bought work and permission — and permission is the word to sit with, because it is doing more for you than you think.
So why has nothing gone wrong?
Because a recording you asked for, paid for and were given is very likely covered by an implied nonexclusive licence, which needs no signature.
This is the part nobody tells self-releasing artists, and it is the reason the sky has not fallen on a decade of unsigned sessions. The leading case is Effects Associates v. Cohen, where a film producer commissioned special-effects footage, paid part of the fee, and got sued for using it. The Ninth Circuit held there was no transfer of copyright — and that Cohen could use the footage anyway:
A nonexclusive license may be granted orally, or may even be implied from conduct.
Conduct. Not paper. The same court set out what conduct does it, in a case about software that states the test cleanly — Asset Marketing Systems v. Gagnon:
(1) a person (the licensee) requests the creation of a work, (2) the creator (the licensor) makes that particular work and delivers it to the licensee who requested it, and (3) the licensor intends that the licensee-requestor copy and distribute his work.
Read that against your last session. You asked for the record. They made it and sent it. Everyone in the room knew it was going up on Spotify in six weeks.
And the delivery does double duty, which is the elegant part. Effects says in a footnote that while handing over a copy “does not of itself convey any rights in the copyrighted work,” citing the same section 202 quoted above, “it is one factor that may be relied upon in determining that an implied license has been granted.” One act, two answers. It did not give you the copyright, and it helps prove you were given permission.
Then the question everyone asks second: can they take it back? Not at will, where money changed hands. Asset Marketing again:
If an implied license accompanied by consideration were revocable at will, the contract would be illusory.
Two limits, stated once and not softened. None of this is in the statute. The Copyright Act requires a signed writing to transfer ownership. A nonexclusive licence is not a transfer, which is the hinge the split sheet piece walks in detail. Judge-made law fills the gap, and the test above is the Ninth Circuit’s. A court somewhere else is not bound by it. And a test is applied to facts. The facts here are yours: what was asked for, what was delivered, and what everybody understood the recording was for.
What can you not do with a licence you could do with the copyright?
Four things: grant anyone exclusivity, sue an infringer, stop the producer licensing the recording elsewhere, or sell it with clean title.
This is where the unsigned deal costs you, and it costs you late, which is the worst time for a bill to arrive.
You cannot grant what you do not hold. A sync buyer, a label, a catalogue buyer, an ad agency — every one of them wants exclusivity over something, and exclusivity is carved out of ownership. Permission to use a record is not a supply of permission to hand to other people.
You cannot sue the person who steals it. Section 501(b) is short about who gets to walk into court:
The legal or beneficial owner of an exclusive right under a copyright is entitled, subject to the requirements of section 411, to institute an action for any infringement of that particular right committed while he or she is the owner of it.
An exclusive right. A nonexclusive licensee is not on that list. Somebody rips the recording into their own release, and the person with standing to do something about it is the producer who has not answered a message since 2021.
The producer keeps everything the licence did not take. Effects is blunt about how little the licensor gave up: “Copyright ownership is comprised of a bundle of rights; in granting a nonexclusive license to Cohen, Effects has given up only one stick from that bundle — the right to sue Cohen for copyright infringement.” And what they kept is not passive. “Additionally, Effects may license, sell or give away for nothing its remaining rights in the special effects footage.”
And you cannot sell it clean. This one is ours rather than a court’s: every serious buyer’s diligence asks for chain of title, and chain of title is a stack of signatures. An invoice is not in the stack. The offer does not usually vanish — it gets re-priced, or it gets an indemnity clause with your name in it, which is the same thing arriving quietly.
So the position is: you can put the record out, and you can be paid for it, and you cannot do the three things that turn a catalogue into an asset. Dealt to you by a transaction you thought you closed in 2019, and the other party is not at the table any more.
Does Canada answer this differently?
Yes — Canadian law gives the copyright in a sound recording to its maker, the person who undertook the arrangements necessary for the first fixation.
No performers-and-producers default, no nine categories, no work-for-hire argument. Section 18(1) of the Copyright Act puts the copyright in the maker’s hands, and section 2 says who that is:
maker means … (b) in relation to a sound recording, the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the first fixation of the sounds are undertaken
Arrangements. Not performance, not authorship, not who touched the faders. The person who put the session together. Section 2.11 spells out what that covers:
… the arrangements referred to in paragraph (b) of the definition maker in section 2, as that term is used in section 19 and in the definition eligible maker in section 79, include arrangements for entering into contracts with performers, financial arrangements and technical arrangements required for the first fixation of the sounds for a sound recording.
Financial arrangements, named in the statute. If you booked the room, hired the players and paid for all of it, you are looking at the person the definition describes.
Two pieces of precision that the confident version of this advice leaves out. Section 2.11 introduces itself as a clarification of the definition “as that term is used in section 19 and in the definition eligible maker in section 79” — the remuneration right and the eligibility rule, not section 18’s ownership rule. It is glossing the same definition section 18 turns on, and it does not say it is glossing it for that purpose. And money is one of three kinds of arrangement the section names, beside contracts with performers and the technical arrangements. A paid invoice is evidence of being the maker. Evidence is not proof.
Which country’s law applies is a separate question. The answer turns on where the work happened and what anybody signed, and this page can see neither. Write both down while you still remember them.
What do you send the producer now?
A short assignment naming the recordings, dated, signed by the producer, and reciting what was paid for them.
Not a renegotiation. Not a letter from anyone. A document that writes down the deal you both thought you had made, and it is one page.
- Name the recordings. Titles, and the ISRCs if they exist, because “the songs we did in March” is not a schedule.
- Assign the rights in those recordings to you. The clause that does the work in a producer agreement is quoted in full in the master piece, and it is two lines.
- Say what was paid. The fee, and anything ongoing — if points were agreed, this is where they get written down instead of remembered.
- Sign it. On paper or with a real e-signature. What a signature has to do, and why a typed name in a form field is not one, is a piece of its own.
That piece carries one more thing you should know before you send anything. Can a writing signed today confirm a deal struck in 2019? The US circuits disagree. One requires the writing to be substantially contemporaneous with the deal; another allows a later one. We are not going to resolve a circuit split for you in a blog post. We are going to point out that both positions get much easier when the document exists and is dated as early as it honestly can be.
Send it while the relationship is good. The cost of this document today is a text message and a coffee. The cost of it after a sync request lands is a negotiation with somebody who has just learned what they are holding.
What if they say no, or you cannot find them?
You keep the licence and its limits, so document what was asked for, what was delivered and what was paid.
That conduct is what an implied licence is inferred from, which turns a legal doctrine into a filing job. Go back and read the test in section two of this piece. Every element of it is an event that happened in a message thread: the request, the delivery, the shared understanding of what the record was for. That thread is not correspondence any more. It is the paperwork.
So do the filing while it is findable. The commissioning message, the delivery email with the stems attached, the transfer receipt, and any line where either of you referred to the release. Keep them with the release, not in a search box — email accounts get closed, phone numbers get recycled, and a screenshot of a thread you can no longer scroll is worth a fraction of the thread.
A silent producer and a hostile one are not the same problem, and today they call for the same work. Neither changes what you may do with the recording, and both make the four limits permanent until a signature moves them.
Which release do you fix first?
The one that earns, the one somebody has asked to license, and the one you would sell. In that order.
The one that earns. Money attracts attention, and attention is how a dormant question becomes a live one. Whatever is top of your statement is where a producer’s memory gets sharpest.
The one somebody has asked about. A sync request is a deadline with a stranger attached. If a supervisor asks on Tuesday who owns the master and the honest answer takes three weeks to assemble, they use something else on Wednesday.
The one you would sell. Not because you are selling — because the exercise finds every recording where the paper stops, and it finds them at your speed rather than a buyer’s.
Then do the whole catalogue in the order failures propagate, which is what the audit is for. One release tonight, though. Pick the one that earns and go and find out what you actually signed.
FAQ
Can the producer stop you releasing a record you paid for?
On the Ninth Circuit’s test, no, where you asked for the recording, the producer made it and delivered it, and it was made to be released. That conduct grants an implied nonexclusive licence, and a licence paid for is not revocable at will. A court outside the Ninth Circuit is not bound by that test.
Can you sell a master you only have a licence to?
No. A nonexclusive licence is permission to use a recording, not title to it, and permission is not a thing you can hand to somebody else. A buyer asks for the signed assignment, not the invoice.
Does paying for the session make you the owner in Canada?
Not by itself. Canadian law gives the copyright in a sound recording to its maker, defined as the person who undertook the arrangements necessary for the first fixation of the sounds, and the Act names financial arrangements as one of three kinds.
The producer will not answer. What do you do?
Keep the evidence the licence rests on — the request, the delivery and the payment — filed with the release rather than in a search box. Treat the recording as unsellable until an assignment is signed.
Sources
- US Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 202 — that ownership of a copyright is distinct from ownership of the material object the work is embodied in, and that transferring the object conveys no rights in the work.
- US Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 501(b) — that only the legal or beneficial owner of an exclusive right may bring an infringement action.
- Effects Associates, Inc. v. Cohen, 908 F.2d 555 (9th Cir. 1990) — that a nonexclusive licence may be granted orally or implied from conduct; that delivery of a copy is one factor in finding an implied licence (n.6); and what the licensor keeps, including the right to license, sell or give away its remaining rights.
- Asset Marketing Systems, Inc. v. Gagnon, 542 F.3d 748 (9th Cir. 2008) — the three-part implied licence test, and that an implied licence accompanied by consideration is not revocable at will. Cited to the court’s own opinion as published by govinfo.gov.
- Copyright Act (Canada), section 18(1) — that the maker of a sound recording has the copyright in it. Consolidation current to 2026-06-17.
- Copyright Act (Canada), section 2 — the definition of maker: for a sound recording, the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the first fixation of the sounds are undertaken. Consolidation current to 2026-06-17.
- Copyright Act (Canada), section 2.11 — that those arrangements include contracts with performers, financial arrangements and technical arrangements, and the sections that clarification is written for. Consolidation current to 2026-06-17.
This is not legal advice. The United States half of this page rests on two Ninth Circuit decisions, which is judge-made law and not a statute, and courts elsewhere decide these cases their own way; the Canadian half states what the Act says and asserts no outcome for any particular session. Every page cited here was read on the date at the top of this piece. What your recordings are worth turns on facts this page cannot see — get a music lawyer in the right territory to read the paper before you rely on any of it.
Keeping the register
The section above says the evidence is the asset, which is a filing problem before it is a legal one. CatalogTracker keeps agreements attached to the release they belong to — uploaded, content-hashed, with a warning when the splits or the parties have drifted from what was signed, and a history of who changed what. It stores the document. It does not write your assignment and it cannot tell you whether the one you have is any good. In development for iPhone.