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Who owns the master when you self-release

You do — and quite possibly not alone. Self-releasing means no label took your master, but it does not make you its sole author. Under US law the authors of a sound recording are the performers and the producer who captured and shaped it, and the work-for-hire clause most producer agreements rely on does not do what people assume it does.

What is “the master,” exactly?

One song is two copyrights, and they are owned separately.

The workWhat it isWho authors it
Musical workThe song — melody, harmony, lyricsSongwriters and composers
Sound recordingThe particular recorded performance — “the master”Performers and producers

The Copyright Office states the boundary plainly: the copyright in a sound recording covers the recording itself, and does not cover the music, lyrics, words or other underlying content embodied in it.

So “owning your masters” says nothing about who owns the song. Two artists can each own their own recording of the same composition, and neither owns the composition. If you wrote it and recorded it, you hold both — but they are separate assets that transfer separately, are registered separately, and get lost separately.

Who is the author of a sound recording?

The Copyright Office, in its own guidance:

Sound recordings are created by performers and/or producers. In other words, the author of a sound recording may be the performer featured in the recording, and/or the producer who captured, manipulated, and/or edited the sounds that appear in the final recording.

Note and/or. If you sang it and someone else recorded, comped and mixed it, the default reading is that there are two authors of that master — and, exactly as with a song, joint authors are co-owners in equal undivided shares unless something in writing says otherwise.

That is the sentence to sit with. The producer who tracked your EP in their bedroom for a flat fee may, on the default rules, be a co-owner of the recordings.

Now the calibration, because the default is scarier on paper than in the case law. Joint authorship of a recording is tested the same way as joint authorship of a song: everyone must have intended, at the time, to be co-authors. A producer who quoted a fee, invoiced it, said nothing about ownership and first claimed authorship after the record earned has a hard intent case, and courts have not been generous with it. The risk is not that you will probably lose the master; it is that resolving the question costs a lawyer, and removing it costs a signature.

Doesn’t the work-for-hire clause handle that?

This is the part that is genuinely under-explained, and it is worth reading your producer agreement over.

A work made for hire has exactly two routes under section 101, and neither is a magic phrase:

  1. An employee, within the scope of employment. A producer you hired for a project is almost never your employee in the sense courts mean — that turns on tax treatment, control, benefits and the rest, not on what the contract calls them.
  2. A specially ordered or commissioned work, in writing, and falling into one of nine listed categories.

Here are the nine, verbatim from the statute: a contribution to a collective work, a part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, a translation, a supplementary work, a compilation, an instructional text, a test, answer material for a test, or an atlas.

A sound recording is not on that list.

It nearly was. In 1999 an amendment quietly inserted “as a sound recording” into the definition; the outcry from artists was loud enough that Congress repealed it the following year in the Work Made for Hire and Copyright Corrections Act of 2000 — and went further, directing that neither the insertion nor its removal be given any weight by a court or the Copyright Office when interpreting the provision. The category was put back exactly as it was, deliberately.

So a commissioned sound recording does not become a work made for hire because an agreement says it is one. (There is an argument that a track delivered for an album is a “contribution to a collective work” and so does fit a listed category; it is a real argument and it is not settled, which is a thin foundation for owning your catalogue.)

Then what actually transfers ownership?

An assignment, in writing, signed. Section 204(a):

A transfer of copyright ownership, other than by operation of law, is not valid unless an instrument of conveyance, or a note or memorandum of the transfer, is in writing and signed by the owner of the rights conveyed or such owner’s duly authorized agent.

Which gives you one concrete thing to go and check today. Open your producer agreement and look for the fallback — the clause that reads roughly:

… and to the extent any such work is determined not to be a work made for hire, Producer hereby irrevocably assigns to Artist all right, title and interest in and to the recordings.

That second half is what actually does the work. A well-drafted agreement has it. A template pulled off a forum in 2019 often does not, and an agreement resting on the work-for-hire label alone may be resting on nothing.

If there is no written agreement with the producer at all, there is no transfer, and the default rules above are what govern.

What does the producer get, if not the master?

Paid twice, by custom. A fee up front, and a royalty on what the recording earns — “points,” typically three to five percent of whatever revenue base the agreement defines, more for a producer with a name. Ownership goes to the artist; the producer’s continuing interest is the royalty, not the copyright.

That trade is why the assignment clause is routine rather than hostile. The agreement that carries the assignment is the same agreement that grants the points, so a producer asked to sign one is being offered the standard deal, not done out of something. A producer who wants to keep a share of the master instead is proposing a different deal — a real one, occasionally the right one — and it belongs in a sentence someone chose, not in the silence where an agreement should have been.

Does your distributor take any of it?

No — the major self-release distributors are explicit that they do not take ownership. DistroKid’s terms:

Between you and DistroKid, DistroKid does not claim any ownership rights with respect to your User Content.

What they do take is a licence, and it is broad. The same terms have you grant a non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide licence to use, copy, reproduce, publicly perform, stream, reformat, excerpt and distribute your content in connection with the services. That is not ownership, and it is also not nothing — read the current version rather than a summary of it, including whatever it now says about machine learning, because these terms change and yours is the version you agreed to.

The practical distinction: distribution is a licence you can end. Ownership is not. If a distributor disappears tomorrow, your masters are still yours; what you lose is delivery, your store links, and possibly your release history.

What about everyone else who played on it?

Session musicians are the loose end most self-releasing artists never tie off.

A player who performs on the recording has a plausible claim to be one of its performers, and therefore one of its authors. In the label world this is handled by paperwork nobody thinks about — union agreements, session forms, an assignment signed before anyone plays. Self-releasing, that paperwork is whatever you remembered to send.

Two things reduce it to almost nothing, and both are cheap:

  • A one-page assignment, signed before or at the session. Name the recording, name the player, assign their rights in the recording to you, state the fee. This is normal and nobody is offended by being asked.
  • Say what the credit is at the same time. Most session disagreements are about acknowledgement rather than ownership, and settling the credit in the same breath removes the reason the ownership question ever gets raised.

How do you find out what you actually own?

Per release, four questions. They take about ten minutes each and the answers are worth having before someone else needs them.

  1. Is there a signed agreement with the producer? If yes, does it contain the assignment fallback, or only the work-for-hire label?
  2. Did anyone else perform on it? List them. Note which ones signed anything.
  3. Who is named as the copyright owner on the delivered release? The P-line on your distributor’s product page is a claim you have already published. Check it says what you believe.
  4. Is the sound recording registered, and in whose name? Registration is not what creates the copyright, but it is the record everyone else will consult.

Where the answer is “I don’t know,” that release is the one to start with — and the fix is almost always a short signed document, obtained now while everyone is still friendly and reachable. The cost of getting it later, from someone who has since worked out that they might own part of your catalogue, is not comparable.

Sources

This is not legal advice, and it describes US law. Canada and the UK reach some of these answers differently, particularly on who authors a sound recording. Producer and session agreements are worth an hour of a music lawyer’s time before you sign one, not after.

Keeping the register

CatalogTracker keeps each release with its contributors, its ownership splits and the agreements attached to it, so the four questions above have answers you can look up rather than reconstruct. In development for iPhone.