There are many websites that will copyright your music or other literary works, will fill out all of the required forms for you and will charge you a nominal fee ranging from $50-$75 to hundreds of dollars plus filing fees.
The truth is, you should be able to register your work for the cost of the filing fee (less than $50.00) by going directly to the Library of Congress. You can do it yourself and you can do it quickly….and, you can do it online using interactive forms.
If you don’t have access to a computer, you can call them and they will mail you paper forms.
If you have copyrighted your materials before, and you paid hundreds of dollars, you more than likely passed over the right website and went to an agent’s site where you paid more than you should have.
Independent musicians have a limited amount of money and need the resources for more important things to build their own music business.
There are other tricks to save money as well, such as copyrighting an entire body of work under a single copyright instead of copyrighting each indvidual song.
The US Government Copyright Office has a very simple, easy-to-navigate site that will allow you to quickly and affordably copyright your work. Before you throw away hundreds of dollars on something that you can do yourself, check it out at:
www.copyright.gov/
You should never pay money for copyright forms and it’s simple to do it. Don’t waste your money, go direct to the source and do it yourself.
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