nashville pop
Register your music everywhere
Every song you release needs to be registered in a handful of places, or the money it earns has nowhere to go. This page walks you through all of them, for free or at the lowest possible cost. No extras. No middleman taking a cut. Just the direct route, in order.
One clean rule runs the whole page: one distributor, on a base plan, and every other registration done directly.
First, one idea: two things
A song is two different things, and they get registered in different places. Keep them apart and everything below makes sense.
The song
The composition. Who wrote it, and in what splits. This is the words and the melody, whoever performs them.
Its code: ISWC
The recording
One specific recorded version of that song. Your studio take, your live take, each one is its own recording.
Its code: ISRC
Get your facts straight once, and every form after that is the same sheet in a new shape. That is the whole trick.
The walkthrough
Do these in order. Each one unlocks the next.
Get the splits right first
Before any form: the title, every writer under their legal name, and each writer's share of the music and of the lyrics. Each column adds up to 100. Publishing is its own side, kept separate. If you have no publisher, say so. You still register.
Also settle: is it a cover, does it use a sample, is it public domain? Forms ask these questions, and guessing later means fixing records later.
Why first: every destination below asks for this same sheet. Fix it once, here, and you never retype it.
Put the recording out, one distributor, base plan only
Pick one distributor. Take the base plan. Skip every per-release extra offered at checkout. That is where the cheap route quietly stops being cheap.
Your recording gets its ISRC here. Do not skip this step. Later registrations need that code, and at least one of them will block you without it.
Join one writer society
Register the composition with one performing rights organization, BMI or ASCAP. A writer belongs to only one at a time for US performance royalties. Joining as a writer is free at both. Register each song there with the splits from step 1.
The publisher side is a separate affiliation. If you act as your own publisher, that is its own step, and it carries its own fee. It is not part of the writer signup.
Register with the MLC for streaming mechanicals
The Mechanical Licensing Collective collects the mechanical royalties from streaming in the US and pays them monthly. Connecting with the MLC is free. Sign up, then register your songs in the Member Hub.
Then go back and check: do your songs actually show up under your name? Whoever put them there, verify it by looking. A registration you never checked is not a registration you can count on.
Register your recordings with SoundExchange
SoundExchange pays for the recording itself when it plays on digital radio and similar services. This is the recording side, not the song side.
Being the performer on a recording and owning the recording are two different claims. Register for the ones that are yours. Each recording needs its artist name, title, and ISRC.
Before you register anything twice, search first
Check whether the song already exists in each system, under every title spelling you have ever used, before you register it again. A song registered twice under two spellings becomes a merge problem that can take months to untangle.
Submitted is not confirmed. After every step above, go back and read the record. If it does not show your song with the right splits, it is not done.
A note on administrators
You can pay a company to file some of this for you, for a percentage of the royalties. That is a real shortcut, not a scam. But the percentage is a cut of every royalty for as long as the term runs. Everything above is free to do yourself, and now you know how.
Outside the US? The map is the same shape, but your country has its own societies. In Canada, for example, that is SOCAN. Start with your local writer society.
No site can register everything for you in one click. If someone promises that, they are selling you something.
Track it all in one place
That is what MyPublisher is for. Enter your song once, see every registration on one sheet, and know what is done and what is missing, instead of keeping it in five tabs and a spreadsheet.
Track it with MyPublisherBuilt by Nashville Pop, for independent artists. Fees and rules checked October 2026. They change, so if a number here ever disagrees with the official page, trust the official page. Questions? Write to messageme@chazmazzota.com.