Why Register My Music?
Published February 2, 2026 by Derrik Bosse
As musicians in the information and AI era, we find ourselves working harder than ever to stay afloat — not just financially, but motivationally. It’s becoming harder to make a living solely from music. An artist can win a Grammy one year and be moving back in with their parents the next. Consistency is key, yet when the factors that make a music career fail or succeed seem ever so random, it’s difficult to know which direction to take.
Still, as long as it feels gratifying to play a gig and see the money show up in Venmo, or when a stranger finds our album on Bandcamp, or comments “Amazing work!” on a YouTube post, we know that it is our fortitude and creativity being appreciated. It almost doesn’t matter whether the performance took five minutes, five hours, or five years to perform.
After all, “Fight for Your Right” was reportedly written in minutes. “We Will Rock You” and “Seven Nation Army” likely took no longer. These songs didn’t just become successful — they crossed into cultural folklore.
What’s the Difference?
Some of my songs and some of your songs were written just as fast, with similar spirit and energy. The proof is there in our recordings. So what’s the difference?
If any of us truly knew the answer, everyone would be successful. There would be no one to write this article, and no one to read it. However, there are key things that help A LOT.
1. Your assets are organized.
2. People know how to describe you.
3. You have a name they can say.
4. They know where to find you.
The last 3 are key to how algorithms work. Understanding what an algorithm is can make things seem a lot less overwhelming, and set you up to be motivated to register with a Performance Rights Organization, which is the first exercise in getting your intellectual property organized and manageable.
Algorithms Are Not New
When we release music online, it feels like were are letting a fish loose into a limitless, ever-expanding ocean of sound, but it’s a bit more complicated than that. If you’re a fish that can’t survive in salt water, you’ll end up in a lake. And if that lake doesn’t have enough food, you’ll have to resort to a pond. This is the algorithm for nature, and the internet has an algorithm too.
Musical algorithms aren’t just something of the last decade, though. When I was in elementary and middle school in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, the algorithm was still largely word of mouth. If I brought up an artist during a conversation, it was because I valued that artist and felt that artist could bring value to others.
We stood behind our favorite artists. It was all we talked about through high school and my college years. We listened to Beatles and Fugazi on repeat, 50 and 20 years after those songs were recorded. One band was backed by an international corporation, the other was DIY.
It benefits the music industry and affiliates to try to convince people that success can happen overnight. But what looks like a “quick” moment from the outside is often the result of years of preparation, paired with being in the right place at the right time. But it’s also an algorithm – how modern platforms decide which content is worth promoting, in order to gain more popularity and profit. It was the same popularity we hoped for by being the one who knew all the best artists.
Either way, we’ve worked hard to get to release day, and we deserve to be ready if opportunity does come. That might mean having physical products to sell at shows, or making sure our intellectual property is organized and protected before we approach labels, or they approach us.
Protecting Your Intellectual Property vs. Monetizing
You may not be in it for the money, or put another way, you may not be too concerned with needing to profit from your product. At this point, ask yourself the following questions:
- Am I not interested in monetizing, or do I just don’t believe my music CAN monetize?
- If some music god (rhetorical) told me my music would monetize heavily, would I turn down that opportunity?
- Do I see my music release as a product? Or is it art? Can it be both?
- Why shouldn’t my product / art be worth anything?
- How do the other contributors feel about our music? Do they believe our release is purchasable?
In my experience, people usually have their heart in the right place, and their position is among the following:
“I just want to make my music accessible to everyone, so I don’t want to charge for it.”
That’s great, but other people are going to make money from your music if you don’t. They can make A LOT of money.
“So what? Fine. Let them listen.”
Did you consider that the same processes that allow you to monetize also protect the rights of your music?
Direct Sale vs Streaming
The big companies making money off your music aren’t doing anything illegal (that we know of). You gave them permission when you signed their Terms of Use Agreement.
Consider that there are non-legitimate entities that can steal your intellectual property, re-record it, register it as their own, and then sell or redistribute it. Would you believe this has happened since the beginning of the recording industry?
A great alternative to having to deal with streaming platforms is a platform like Bandcamp. You can sell your album, EP, or individual songs at your own price and keep nearly all of the revenue. The only issue is that unless you are doing what many others are already doing already, Bandcamp’s algorithm will be less likely to notice you. That’s why we almost have no choice – we must take every opportunity for our music to get heard, even if we have to bend the knee to a big corporation that profits while we struggle.
This isn’t meant to scare you. It just makes sense that if we value something so highly, we should: a) want to protect it; b) know when someone is monetizing on our effort; c) be able to have a say in how and when others can monetize from our efforts; and d) feel rewarded in a way that is measurable and useful.
In the next article, we’ll go over what a Performance Rights Organization (PRO) and how registering your music successfully will not only be an exercise in organizing your intellectual property, but will provide you with a solid foundation for an even more effective and wide-reaching release.