What to register before fees rise.
The U.S. Copyright Office is preparing its first fee change since 2020, and that makes October a good month for independent artists to do something most of us put off too long: clean up the catalog.
In July 2026, the Copyright Office submitted a proposed new fee schedule to Congress after a multi-year cost study. Under the law, the Office can institute the new fees after a 120-day congressional review period unless Congress passes legislation rejecting them. The Office says it is aiming to implement the new schedule in fall 2026.
That does not mean panic-registering everything in a hard drive.
It means knowing what you actually own.
For musicians, one release can contain multiple copyrightable pieces. The song itself is one copyright. The sound recording is another. Cover art may be separately protected. Video, photography and liner-note text can carry their own rights. Collaborations can complicate ownership even further.
The current Copyright Office fee schedule still lists $45 for an eligible Single Application and $65 for the Standard Application. Those amounts are useful reference points now, but the larger lesson is that filing costs are not static.
The smartest move is an audit.
Start with music already released. Ask whether the composition and master have been properly documented. Then move to unreleased work that is genuinely finished and likely to be commercially used. Confirm writers, splits, publishers, producers and master owners before filing anything.
One distinction matters: copyright protection does not suddenly appear because you filed a registration. Copyright generally exists when an original work is fixed in a tangible medium. Registration, however, provides important legal and administrative benefits, and timing can matter when a creator later needs to enforce rights.
The worst time to discover that your paperwork is confused is after a song starts moving.
Independent music businesses spend enormous energy on promotion while leaving ownership records unfinished. That is backwards. Metadata, registrations, split sheets and contracts are not glamorous, but they are part of the product.
So the headline is not really that copyright costs more.
The headline is that unfinished rights administration already costs artists money.
G.U.M.M. Move: Make a list of completed songs, masters, artwork and videos. Mark what is registered, what is not, who owns each element, and what needs documentation before the new fee schedule takes effect.
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