Making available a piece of music and/or sound recording you own all the rights to on a streaming and/or download platform
Type of use
Uploading the sound recording of a piece of music to which you own all the rights on legal streaming or download platforms. Let’s say you are an independent artist or record label and wish to make your music available via platforms such as iTunes or Spotify and you own all of the rights for the work itself and its sound recording.
What To Do
- Make sure you effectively have the permission of all the rights holders of a piece of music and sound recording: songwriters, performing artists, publishers, producers of the master copy as well as the rights holders for the accompanying visuals.
- Follow each platform’s process to make your music available through them and, if need be, go through a digital music distributor.
- Make sure you collect all your copyright and neighbouring rights revenues both in Canada and abroad through collective rights management societies such as SOCAN, Artisti, SOPROQ, CMRRA, etc.
Clarifications and cautionary statement
The music industry is complex and competitive, we strongly recommend dealing with professionals.
We strongly recommend obtaining counsel from an entertainment and/or copyright lawyer if you are not familiar with production, licensing and/or distribution agreements.
Make sure you can prove to anyone that you are the sole owner or exclusive licensee of a master copy and of all the rights to the musical works you wish to exploit on a given territory and to demonstrate that you have concluded agreements with all the rights holders involved (performing musicians, composers, visual artists, etc.).
Exploiting the recordings of musical works generates copyright revenues for the piece of music and neighbouring rights for the sound recording. The main copyright revenues collected (for writers, composers and publishers) are for the public performance (communicating via telecommunication, through SOCAN) and reproduction (through SOCAN, CMRRA or another), as well as for private
copying. The main neighbouring rights collected are for public performance and reproduction for the performing artists (through Artisti or another) and for the producers (through SOPROQ or another).
If you are the sole producer of the recordings, the performing artist of all of the songs or instrumental pieces, the songwriter and publisher of all the recorded works, you should still follow all of those steps and sign production and publishing deals between yourself, your record label and publisher.
Associations and other organizations such as ADISQ, APEM, CQM, L’inis, SPACQ and UDA propose relevant workshops and training programs. Outside of major urban areas, the Conseils régionaux de la Culture are good resources for training and general information. Refer to this page for more info.
Related uses
The material on this web site is provided for informational purposes only.