[This is part one of a multi-part miniseries of posts on composition competitions. Competitions are typically a significant part of a composer's coming-of-age process, and young composers in particular are frequently (in some cases constantly) bombarded with exhortations to apply to everything possible from teachers, administrators, and older composers. In these posts, I'm taking a look at various issues with competitions that many composers have come to see as problems, and which have caused many to stop applying altogether.]

A recent Twitter conversation, paired with a competition announcement (also on Twitter), prompted me to immediately start scribbling notes on this week’s post. (Yes, I actually outline my posts on paper before I come here to start tippity-typing away – the same holds true for my music, for what it’s worth.)

In my day, I’ve applied to a fair number of composition competitions, so I’ve been through the process many times, and one thing that has consistently bothered me – and basically soured me on the whole competition experience – is the application fee that many of them charge. The American Music Center, before it was New Music USA, always segregated their opportunity listings into competitions with fees and competitions without fees, and made a point of saying every month that they discourage the practice of charging composers to apply. I almost invariably only ever looked at listings without fees, in part because I – like most composers I know – didn’t (and still don’t) have a lot of money, and dropping $25 for the privilege of collecting yet another poorly-worded rejection letter just didn’t sit well with me. Also, I took to heart what I understood to be the subtle undertone of AMC’s notice about fees: namely, that composers should think twice before applying to a competition that charges a fee. Caveat compositor. Composer beware.

To this day, on the off chance that I feel like looking through the American Composers Forum’s listing of composer cattle calls, I only ever look at those competitions and calls for scores that don’t ask the composer to pony up more of their hard-earned cash. Because, as I’ve said before and will undoubtedly say again: entering these things is expensive and time-consuming enough as it is without the indignity of having to write a check for the privilege of probably being rejected. Printing and binding scores, putting together a CD, writing/updating whatever bios/composer statements/program notes/CVs/etc, postage – all come with time and money costs.

Over the years, I’ve heard a number of justifications for application fees, all of which I’ve found to be increasingly lame.

Before I launch into the justifications, let me just say that I know that every organization that hosts a competition means incredibly well, and wants to foster new music and living composers – for which I (and all composers) are incredibly grateful. But certain practices are no longer in keeping with the times, and have proven to be either ineffective or actually harmful.

Serious applicants only
I can’t count the number of times that people have tried to justify an exorbitant application fee (or any application fee at all) to me by claiming that it prevents “un-serious” composers from applying. Weeding out the riffraff. Who, may I politely-yet-pointedly ask of these competitions, are these “unserious” composers who are flooding your mailboxes with their “unserious” applications? What makes these composers any less serious than those whose applications you actually want to receive?

This (poor) excuse is predicated on the idea that there are droves of dilettante composers who write awful music – probably horribly engraved, to boot – and have nothing better to do than to send out applications to every competition that they come across (doubtless thanks to listings such as ACF’s).

Of course, the only thing that could possibly distinguish a “serious” entry from an “unserious” one is that the composer is willing to pay the application fee! There are certainly no other easy-to-identify criteria that could immediately disqualify an entry that doesn’t meet the eligibility requirements of the competition!

Just to dial down the rhetoric a bit, let’s take “seriousness” to mean “ability to follow written instructions” or “having basic professional abilities”. Meaning, a “serious” applicant would submit a score that exactly follows the posted guidelines in terms of instrumentation, duration, performance history, submitting required additional materials, and presenting their application in a manner that is suitably professional in appearance and execution. Now, I totally stand by the need for professional standards, but to call an application that doesn’t meet them “unserious” is, in my estimation, a severe misrepresentation of the situation.

The process of putting together a submission packet takes time, care, and a surprising amount of money, so I should expect that anyone going to the lengths required to prepare one is sufficiently “serious”.

My own applications to competitions (and, just out of undergrad, schools) were wildly unprofessional in presentation a number of years ago. Not because I wasn’t “serious” about them, but because I didn’t know any better at the time – I hadn’t been taught the proper formatting and etiquette for such things. So to consider those early applications to be “unserious” badly mischaracterizes them. They were merely uneducated.

And as for applications which stray from posted instrumentation or duration guidelines: while, yes, they should be disqualified for not following instructions, they probably aren’t “unserious” in the least. I would imagine that such entrants are merely trying to find a place in the YOUMUSTAPPLYTOEVERYTHINGWHYAREN’TYOUAPPLYINGTOTHIS culture (that is foisted upon us by nearly every teacher and music administrator in our lives) for existing pieces that don’t quite fit the mold that this or that competition would have us conform to.

Really, if there are applications that don’t meet certain standards of quality (engraving) or that don’t follow the entry guidelines (instrumentation, duration, performance history, etc), those entries should be disqualified, and the judges move on. They don’t warrant the preemptive punishment of a $10, $20, or $25 application fee to make us think twice before applying.

And let’s be perfectly honest here. The only type of composer that an application fee will likely deter from applying is a composer who can’t afford to pay the fee in the first place. I speak from a decade of applying experience here. I cannot count the number of competitions that I’ve been unable to apply to not because my works didn’t fit various application criteria or because I didn’t fall within the proper age group (another post for another day – promise!), but because I just couldn’t afford to dish out the $25 and still manage to eat that week. Seriously. For all that I was “serious” about applying, I was much more serious about being able to feed myself. And I’m absolutely positive that I’m not alone in this. In fact, a colleague with whom I share a first name recently said on Twitter, “By the time I could afford to enter competitions, I was already too old for most of them.”

This excuse exhibits the absolute wrong type of gatekeeperism: it does very little to deter the types of applications that it’s supposedly meant to, and instead definitely does prevent composers who are perfectly suited to a competition, and would likely benefit from it the most, from being able to participate.

So for this reason alone, I invite competition hosts to think of the financial burden that they place on the very composers whose careers they claim to want to foster.

Judges’ fees / Administrative costs
As a businessperson, I’m sensitive to budget considerations. I am. But seriously, if this is the reason that a competition is charging an application fee, the admins need to revisit their budget and start thinking ahead a bit more.

If an organization can raise enough money to pay some sort of award, they can also raise the money to cover their administrative costs, as well as any honoraria that they want to give their judges/panelists. Because these aren’t going to be huge costs by any means. Each group will have different needs; and the smaller the group, the smaller the needs. And with electronic submissions being more and more the norm, postage and other costs are increasingly small – to the point of being either negligible or nonexistent.

Judges should be given some sort of honorarium for their participation (when the judge doesn’t waive their fee altogether and just donate their time), but I’m a firm believer that judges and panelists should also have a sense of citizenship and a belief in “paying it forward”. A panelist who insists on being paid $X to judge young composers’ works may not be the best choice for the competition.

Then there are these:

Application fees without monetary awards
I have zero tolerance for this sort of thing. I’ve posted about a competition like this over at the NewMusicShelf, and can really only consider these sorts of things to be scams, no matter how well-meaning the organizers. Anyone running a competition that charges a fee and doesn’t have some sort of monetary award needs to stop hosting that competition NOW.

Application fees with small monetary awards
Seriously, what’s the point? So I’ve dished out $10 to enter your (probably) brand-new competition, and on the off chance that I win, I get $240? Whee!

Organizations that do this sort of thing either need to stop hosting competitions altogether, or seriously get their acts together and start fundraising for the award and admin costs. If the competition is a high enough priority for the organization, then it should be done properly. But I have a nagging feeling that there are more than a few ensembles and organizations that think that hosting a competition is some sort of status symbol, or lends them greater authority and cachet. On the contrary, the organization itself should lend authority and cachet to the competition!

If an organization is truly serious about the competition that it hosts, it should have the foresight to budget for it properly. And if the organization doesn’t have proper funds on hand, it should postpone the current year’s competition and do it right next year.

And don’t even get me started on competitions that use the application fees to fund the prize money!

I’m going to be spending a few weeks on the topic of competitions and various elements that I think need to be addressed. These posts will be aimed at both composers, so that they can be aware of various issues before entering any competition or submitting to a call for scores, and competition administrators, so that they can have a composer’s eye view of the issues involved with competitions and awards. The end of this mini-series will culminate in my (ever-humble) opinion on how I think organizations should structure programs like these to be as supportive as possible of composers and new music without putting a greater burden on those organizations and ensembles.

I write the Composer’s Guide here, taking time away from my composing to do so. If this post helped you in any way, be a dear and click the donate button at the bottom of this post, will you? If you can’t afford to donate, please pass this chapter along to someone who you think might get some help from it.

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This week I’m going to take a brief step away from marketing and self-promotion to talk about….well, another type of marketing and self-promotion, to be completely honest. Though, frankly, everything a composer does is some form of marketing or self-promotion, from the actual music that you write to the ways that you get it out into the world to any appearances you make in public or online.

To that end, I’d like to talk briefly this week about composer behavior in certain situations, and how it can affect the way people view you and your music. This post is largely inspired by a recent experience I had with a composer who behaved particularly poorly in a number of respects, though I’ve seen very similar behavior from a number of other composers throughout my career. I’ll avoid naming names to protect the guilty, and try to generalize as much as possible so that this post doesn’t devolve into a public gripe session.

The ways that we behave in the world greatly affect the trajectories of our careers. A composer who treats performers and audiences and other composers with respect and generosity will in turn receive much better treatment – and probably better opportunities – than one who is selfish and blind to the needs and feelings of others.

The difficulty here is that we spend so much time shaping and crafting our works, and we want so badly for them to be liked and performed well, that we can sometimes be blind to the ways that we behave toward our interpreters and our audiences. Being an artist is in many ways like being a parent – we want the best for our children, and it’s easy to allow that desire to shut out the rest of the world. We can become those Park Slope mommies and daddies who, in the name of wanting the best for their (ridiculously-named) children, become entitled, overbearing, and insufferable.

Case in point:

Not too long ago, I was involved in the premiere of a vocal/chamber work for which the composer was asked to be a member of the pickup ensemble for the performance. With most composers I know, this wouldn’t be a problem, but in this case, it was – and in a very big way. The composer – let’s call them XY – walked into the first rehearsal and, having barely said a word of greeting to any of the performers (none of whom XY had met before), began making changes to the already-confusing (and incredibly poorly-engraved) score. And it was downhill from there. For the remainder of the rehearsal, which ran almost twice as long as scheduled, the ensemble was never allowed to go more than 30 seconds without being stopped and asked to do some new thing that XY had dreamt up that very second, or perform these or those few notes in a way that was not only not notated, but completely inappropriate to a first reading.

Mind you, most of the members of the ensemble had never met one another before, let alone attempted to rehearse this hyper-complex piece, so anything beyond correcting pitches and rhythms seems inappropriate to me. And constant interruptions to make ill-thought-out changes to the score, or exhort the guitarist to play more “digitally” (!?), didn’t help us a) learn the piece, b) have the slightest bit of confidence in the composer’s abilities (or, frankly, sanity), or c) maintain any sort of good will toward the composer.

Despite the fact that XY was very kind and earnest and enthusiastic, they had behaved incredibly poorly. The constant interruptions, and later calls for additional rehearsals, were very disrespectful of the performers’ time, despite the fact that XY didn’t intend any sort of disrespect whatsoever.

[There is much more that was wrong about XY's behavior, but I'm not really writing this to complain (honest!), but as an example of some recent poor composer behavior.]

Now, this was a fairly extreme example, but I can say with a fair amount of certainty that at some point in all of our careers we’ve behaved poorly to some degree. In some respects, I think it’s part of coming of age as a composer. But there does come a point where such things must be left behind.

This isn’t to chide, but to remind that we must be aware of our behavior.

Because it’s by the good will of our performers, audiences, and composer colleagues that we gain any measure of success.

A composer can’t expect to gain a base of performers if they can’t be relied upon to treat performers with respect and courtesy. XY thought that there was no problem interrupting constantly, and asking for several-hour last-minute rehearsals because they’d mismanaged earlier rehearsal time so badly, because it was their piece – their baby. (Yes, that phraseology is awkward, but I’m hell-bent on avoiding gendered pronouns of any sort.) Like those Park Slope mommies and daddies, XY wanted the best for the piece, even though their behavior burned every (every) bridge in that rehearsal room.

I remember one particular instance of not-so-pristine behavior in my composerly adolescence during a rehearsal of a new piece with the choir that was premiering it. I was a member of the choir, and we had literally just finished a concert. The director thought we should spend a little time preparing for an upcoming tour that would feature my new work, so – still in concert attire – we spent some time running various works, mostly mine.

It was the end of the day, we’d just spent the last hour or so singing difficult music, and we were all nearing exhaustion. In my own tiredness, I wasn’t prepared to hear anything but perfection from the choir, and got a little harsh in my criticisms of the group’s sound. Ultimately, I used a particularly inapt and slightly offensive analogy for what I wanted, and – fortunately – the director stepped in and called an end to the rehearsal. I still cringe when I remember that moment, because I knew immediately that I’d just crossed a line. Since I was a member of the group, the other singers forgave and forgot very quickly, but I know that with a choir that didn’t know me as well, I would have fared poorly indeed.

So we’ve all been there.

I think that we all need to remind ourselves periodically that we’re a part of a community – and a remarkably small one, at that – and that we’re dealing with other people who all have the same goals that we do. We all want to make music as best we can. And it’s much better to have a performance that’s a little lacking but the performer wants to do the piece again – or commission a new one – than to behave poorly and potentially burn a bridge.

Again, it’s so easy to be blindered to others by how close we are to our scores.

We should by all means be enthusiastic and passionate about our music, and strive for perfection in performances, but if we’re a part of a rehearsal, or offering feedback on a performance, we must remember that sensitivity to our performers and respect for their time and craft is important. Good will and respect are very mutual things, and it’s important to know how much and what sort of feedback is appropriate to the performer or ensemble that you’re working with.

Of course we’re all probably going to encounter situations at some point in our careers in which one or more performers are hostile to us or our music for whatever reason, but I think that here good will and respect – including self-respect – are even more important. It’s much better to come away from these situations having it said that, “He handled himself well,” than the alternative.

Remember, we’re building relationships with performers – your piece can be performed again, but once you burn a bridge, it’s difficult to rebuild.

I write the Composer’s Guide here, taking time away from my composing to do so. If this post helped you in any way, please leave a tip or a small donation on the way out. If you can’t afford to donate, please pass this chapter along to someone who you think might get some help from it.

Thanks!

One solid way to deal with promotion in a way that removes some of the stress of promoting yourself is to cross-promote with other composers.

There are a ton of options here. Some possibilities are:

• Linking to one another on your websites
• Mentioning one another in your newsletters
• Recommending each other’s scores to performers you know
• Recommending each other’s recordings to your own fan bases
• Placing score samples of one another’s works in instrumentationally-related scores of your own
• Guest blogging on each other’s websites

The benefits here are more far-reaching than merely getting your name out there a little more. Sure, you’re being exposed to a whole new mailing list or potential fan base. But you’re also sending a lot of subtle yet important signals at the same time.

These explicit endorsements of your colleagues say different things to different groups, all of which can only be good.

By recommending another composer’s work to performers and listeners, you’re showing them that you’re not just out for yourself – you care about that composer and their music in particular, and also about the musical community in general. Community-building isn’t something that we as composers have traditionally been very good at, in large part, I think, because we tend to view our colleagues as competition – competition for jobs, competition for performances, competition for awards – and not always as fellow travelers whose goals we share, and with whom we can work toward mutual success. This sort of community-mindedness is, in my perpetually humble opinion, a very attractive quality in an artist, from the viewpoint of a consumer of art. I, for one, listen much more favorably to a composer’s music when I know that they interact well with performers and other composers.

You’re also breaking through the me-me-me-ism that people probably expect in your newsletters and other promotional materials. Devoting that bit of space or time to someone else who you believe in can be a breath of fresh air. And for those of you reluctant to talk solely about yourselves, this gives you an out – by plugging someone else, too, you’re not just talking about yourself. (Sometimes I think that these little ways of thinking can be very helpful in drawing shy and nervous composers out of their shells – it lets them off the hook in small ways that hopefully make self-promotion more comfortable.)

And we shouldn’t ignore the fact that we live in an age when people are interested not just in what an artist creates, but what inspires her, and what her interests are. So these little endorsements are easy ways to let your followers know a bit more about you as a person and as an artist, as well as introduce them to more art that they’ll hopefully be drawn to.

Another option, for those who are so inclined, is to put promotional materials for other composers in the backs of your scores. I’ve started doing this myself, in a limited way. This is a practice that I appropriated from traditional publishers of decades past. All of the older scores that I’ve purchased have a page in the back listing additional pieces with similar instrumentation published by that company. So, in the score for a song cycle, one page at the back of the publication (sometimes the back cover itself) is dedicated to other songs and song sets by composers of roughly similar style and time period.

Now, likely you aren’t publishing other composers’ works. But there are undoubtedly composers whose works you admire, and which you’d like to introduce people to. I recommend sticking to instrumentally-related scores – it would be a little silly to promote a trumpet piece in the score for a string quartet.

I have my own way of formatting these things, but it’s still a little clunky, and I’m working out the kinks. I like to have the cover of the piece I’m recommending available, along with a sample page. But a simple listing of similar pieces along with the composers’ website URLs would be just as effective – as well as a little easier to pull off.

An upshot of the digital age is that many of us have blogs that we update with varying degrees of frequency. It’s worth considering having guest bloggers on your site. By having other composers or performers or whomever write a short post (probably in some sort of reciprocal exchange) you:

a) give them an additional outlet to post to,
b) introduce them to your audience,
c) offer a change of pace for your own readers, and
d) hopefully gain additional readers and site visitors when your guest mentions their appearance on your site.

Maybe try to set up a blog tour with composers who you’ve created relationships with. Each of you can visit the others’ sites for interviews, articles, video posts, whatever you want to do. There are lots of resources online offering advice and suggestions on how to set up and manage a successful blog tour (mostly for authors, but the advice is almost always pertinent).

Of course, these options don’t need to be quid pro quo arrangements (and I believe that they generally shouldn’t – I prefer being generous with those composers I believe in). I’ve taken it on myself to put samples of other composers’ works in the backs of some of my own scores not expecting anything in return from them. Not that I wouldn’t appreciate anything that they might do to promote me, as well, but my intention is to endorse those composers because I like their work.

Your promotion and endorsement of other composers – as in all things – should be genuine.

These promotional solutions, as well as that of composer collectives, are predicated on the idea that the business of concert music is not a zero sum game. We’re not really competing with one another – we’re in this together. And a rising tide lifts all boats.

I write the Composer’s Guide here, taking time away from my composing to do so. If this post helped you in any way, please leave a tip or a small donation on the way out. If you can’t afford to donate, please pass this chapter along to someone who you think might get some help from it.

Thanks!

Alright, now that we’ve talked about some non-everyday, slightly esoteric stuff, let’s tackle something a bit meatier and more immediately applicable: publishing your music.

Let me say here and now (though I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again [and again and again]): I strongly advocate against pursuing a publishing deal with a traditional publisher. Traditional publishers, or legacy publishers as I prefer to call them, are not the institutions that they once were, fostering the careers of promising composers, and advocating for performances and recordings of their living composers. Honestly, though, I’m not sure if they ever really were what “they once were” – just as our cultural memory of the 50s as a wholesome-as-apple-pie, not-a-care-in-the-world era of happiness and prosperity is a false one, I think our memory of publishers as bastions of modern music in the style of Ralph Hawkes’ cultivation of Benjamin Britten is fabricated from equal parts wishful thinking and Stockholm syndrome. We’ve always been taught to believe that if you write good enough music – and maybe win an important prize or two – one of the big houses will swoop down from the heavens and offer you a contract to publish X or Y piece (or an exclusive contract!), and you’ll be taken care of for the rest of your life. All we have to do then is keep writing music, and our publishers will take care of the rest.

Unfortunately, that’s not how it works. At least not anymore. (And I can’t say as I’ve ever heard of a case where things did work like that.)

Concert music publishers today are, for the most part, antiquated subsidiaries of subsidiaries of subsidiaries of multi-national corporations. Some are still independent, but that mostly means that there’s not a larger corporate structure in place to bail them out if they get into financial hot water; although it also means that there’s not a larger corporate structure in place to shut them down if they don’t meet the arbitrary profit expectations set by some accountant sitting in a back office of one of the parent companies, and who has no interest in knowing the concert music industry or its financial idiosyncrasies. This is all to say that, like many things these days, concert music publishing has been corporatized, and is primarily interested in what will sell.

Now none of this is to say that publishers, because they’re corporate, are evil. Nor are they uncaring or lazy.

What they are is: lost.

The world of concert music has never embraced innovation or technological advances. We do the things we do because that’s how things are done, not because they’re efficient or intuitive. Some things are efficient, some things are intuitive, but most things are… tradition.

Take, for example, paper sizes. Concert music is published on 9 x 12 inch paper, while the world operates on 8.5×11; sometimes 8.5×14 or 11×17. But whenever I hazard the opinion that self-publishers should format their scores to 8.5×11 (especially for digital scores, which will be printed by others without specialty printers), at least one person in the room suddenly turns into the Dowager Countess from Downton Abbey – I’m confronted with a flusteredly scowling Maggie Smith, hooting a shocked, “But my dear, it simply isn’t done!”

Publishers are locked in the same mindset. And what changes they make are either too little too late, or mere retrenchment. Most publishers, in response to flagging score sales, resorted to print-on-demand for most of their titles. This allowed them to avoid some warehousing costs, but (at least at first) added 3 to 4 weeks to the delivery time – a major inconvenience to customers. And it took most publishers years and years to create an online storefront on their own websites, which would have afforded them (after the initial investment in an ecommerce setup) a higher rate of profit. Instead, their websites pointed to various and sundry distributor sites, which sold through their own online storefronts, and took a sizable discount, leaving the publishers with less money, as well as less brand recognition: I didn’t buy this score from Boosey & Hawkes; I bought it from SheetMusicPlus. The storefronts of most publishers today are still mostly clunky, ugly, counter-intuitive, hamster-powered labyrinths of confusing nested categories and incomplete misinformation. (Pardon my horribly mixed metaphors.)

Services like Schirmer On Demand are great steps in the right direction, but they won’t, I fear, be enough to save the industry.

Although it’s all I hear in private, it’s difficult to say in public that concert music publishers are dying a slow and agonizing death. (To channel the Dowager Countess myself for a moment: one doesn’t say to a man on his deathbed, “Did you know that you’re dying?” One smiles and comments on the weather, and when one is out of earshot, tsks and tuts and well-he-brought-it-upon-himselfs behind his back.) Without a drastic shift in the way publishers do business, their continued survival will not be a long-lived one, and their various play-it-safe experiments will do little more than put off the inevitable for a few more years.

I’ll continue to pick on legacy publishers as we go, so let’s talk about happier things in the form of your alternative in the game of getting your music “out there”: self-publishing.

It used to be that the mere suggestion of wanting to self-publish was an admission of defeat, or a sign of very poor judgment. Self-published scores used to be synonymous with poorly-engraved scores of music that was, to varying degrees, unlistenable, unplayable, or just plain bad.

Now, some of the most successful composers publish their own works very successfully. Jennifer Higdon, Stephen Paulus, Philip Glass, Alex Shapiro all publish their own works and have thriving careers. No longer is self-publishing a dilettante’s game.

The advantages of self-publication are numerous, and include:
• complete control over rights, layout, pricing;
• larger profits;
• collection of writer and publisher royalties;
• the enthusiasm of your sales force – you.

Compared with a legacy publishing deal, where you hand over all rights and control, earn a 10% royalty on sales, forfeit half of your performance royalties, and are lumped in with hundreds of other composers and thousands of other scores vying for the attention of the already-badly-overworked marketing department…. Self-publishing isn’t looking so bad.

With all the control you maintain, however, come the responsibilities of:
• knowing how to engrave your scores to professional standards;
• managing your bookkeeping;
• finding distribution outlets for your scores and recordings;
• being a good spokesman for your works.

Some of you may start to balk here because <whinyvoice>It’s too much woooork</whinyvoice> and <whinyvoice>It takes up too much tiiiime</whinyvoice>.

Well. As a business, which, if you remember my chapter on the benefits of entrepreneurship, you are, these are things that should be on your mind. Every successful business owner has to think about these things: the quality of their goods or service, cash flow and bookkeeping, distribution channels, ways to let people know about their services, finding new business/clients. They’re a necessary part of establishing and growing a business. And they’re a necessary part of establishing and growing your compositional career.

Some of us are already good at some of these things. For me, engraving is a part of my composing process – although I write in a number of different ways (at the piano, at the computer, away from both piano and computer, hurriedly scribbling notes on the subway before I get to my stop), I’m always thinking about the final look of the score: how will I notate this? is there a clearer way to show that? how in the hell do I put that on the page? And I’m ridiculous about bookkeeping – I have spreadsheets for everything: performance royalty tracking, project budgets, what I owe my collaborators in royalties from score sales. I have a spreadsheet where I enter my musical income, and it analyses the data so that I can track my income by score, income by year earned, income by year of composition, and income by source. It may be a little overkill for some people’s tastes, but I know where my money comes from, and that helps me to know where my energies are (literally) paying off.

For those of you starting to get panicky over all of these businessy considerations, take a deep breath – no one is forcing you to implement everything all in one go and to understand the whole shebang out of the gate. For the rest of the year, we’ll be tackling these issues piece by piece, and exploring ways to approach each one.

For this week, your homework is to take stock of your skills as a businessman/businesswoman, and be honest with yourself about where your strengths and weaknesses lie. Consider yourself in the role of a shop owner or service provider: what do you need to keep in mind to manage your business properly? Now, compare those requirements to your composing career: where are the similarities? Where are the almost-similarities? Where are the differences that really aren’t all the different when you think about it a little bit? And what just flat-out doesn’t apply? I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that there aren’t many that fall in the last category.

So tell me: what are your strengths? And how do you intend to capitalize on them? And what do you intend to do to address your weaknesses?

I write the Composer’s Guide here, taking time away from my composing to do so. If this post helped you in any way, please leave a tip or a small donation on the way out. If you can’t afford to donate, please pass this chapter along to someone who you think might get some help from it.

Thanks!

Welcome to this week’s installment of The Composer’s Guide to Doing Business. This week, I’d like to continue our discussion of copyright, and cover the whys and the wherefores of registering your copyrights with the U.S. Copyright Office.

Before we get started, though, I’d like to remind everyone that I’m not a lawyer or a law professional, just a composer with an obsession with the practical aspects of having a career in music. This Guide shouldn’t be interpreted as “legal advice”, but as observations based on experience and (extensive) research.

On to the fun stuff!

Thanks to the Copyright Office’s new online system, registering your copyrights could hardly be easier. The first copyright I registered was back in 1998 – one of my very first compositions, which I guarantee will never see the light of day until some lucky doctoral student decides to write their dissertation on my juvenalia decades from now. My Sonata in C#-minor (yeah, I know) was the first thing I’d written that I’d taken the pains to notate, and it was such a special occasion for 16-year-old me that I raced out to get it copyrighted as soon as possible.

Even then, having to fill out the paper form and mail it off, it was an easy process – so long as you had the right form – and I had no difficulty at all, even at such a tender age. With a little poking around online with my family’s AOL account (who’d have thought the internet could ever have been that young?) I found Form PA, printed it out, and set about registering my very first copyright. The form itself was only two pages (it still is, and hasn’t changed a lick in the intervening years), and took a matter of minutes to fill out. I’m sure I spent infinitely longer looking over the form again and again to make sure I hadn’t overlooked something or misread the instructions. Imagine my surprise to learn that such a fabled thing – a COPYRIGHT – was so easy to register!

Off the form went in the mail with a photocopy of the manuscript and a check for $65, and a few months later (no one ever accused the government of working quickly) my form showed up again in my mailbox with the “Do not write above this line” section filled out with my registration number and effective date. Bliss!

Now there may not have been much call to register the copyright for that particular piece, especially since no one has seen it (and I’ve barely thought of it) since the late ’90s, but by going through the process, I learned a very valuable lesson: things like this tend to be a lot easier than they seem.

Even though the thought of bureaucracy and filling out forms can be daunting to some, registering your copyright is a very simple thing to do. And it’s something that every composer should do, for a number of reasons.

Why Register Your Copyrights?
A few months ago, a friendly acquaintance on Twitter weighed in on my earlier post about copyright, and said that he didn’t think that the government should be the arbiter of copyright at all. I kept my snark to myself, being the polite, gentle soul that I am (*wonders of anyone actually believed that last bit*).

Of course, I wanted to give my acquaintance a light smack on the head.

Government is the arbiter of copyright. And there’s no other arbiter even remotely possible.

Why?

Well, let’s look at some of the benefits of registration, and go from there.

The primary benefit of registering with the U.S. Copyright Office is so that if your copyright is infringed upon, you have clear redress to the situation.

The first step to take in case of an infringement is to get a lawyer. Your lawyer will draft a letter informing the person or business:
a) that they are infringing on your copyright, and
b) that they must stop their use of your materials at once.

The second step is to drag their sorry asses to court. Now, in some instances, the infringement isn’t severe enough to bring to this point. Some people just plain won’t have known that what they were doing was illegal, and will be mortified, and stop what they were doing right away. Chances are, these people won’t have done enough damage to warrant taking to court.

But other people…

Sometimes the other party just won’t stop. Either they don’t care, or they think you don’t mean business, or they’re just black-hatted, mustachioed arch-villains bent upon the destruction of society through their disregard of intellectual property laws. Y’know. The founders of Napster. (I kid, I kid.)

In this situation, your registration with the copyright office will be immeasurably in your favor, because you can’t even file an infringement suit without a registration! Without a registration, the only redress you have is to write letters and cry into your pillow.

If you decide to wait until someone has already infringed on your copyright, you’d better be quick about registering.

Copyright holders who register in a timely manner are entitled to significantly greater damages in infringement suits. Many victims of copyright infringement are only entitled to actual damages – the amount of money the other person gained from the infringement. This usually isn’t much at all, so the costs of filing the suit will far outweigh the damages that you’ll be paid in this instance.

However, when you register in a timely manner and successfully sue the infringer, you’re also entitled to what are referred to as statutory damages, as well as court costs and legal fees. This is a HUGE incentive to register your works.

If your work is published – and, considering as most of us self-publish these days, it probably is – you have two chances to register in what is considered a “timely manner”. Your registration is considered timely if it’s done either:
a) within three months of publication, or
b) before the infringement first occurred.

If your work is “unpublished”, you must register before the infringement occurred in order to be eligible for statutory damages (which can be as high as $150k!), court costs, and attorney fees.

If you didn’t already, I hope you’re starting to see how government can be the only arbiter of copyright. Registration incentives aside, copyright and intellectual property laws define the scope of the protections that you’re entitled to in the event that your music is stolen or used without your permission. Remember from last week that copyright was written into the body of the Constitution – it was deemed more important than the Bill of Rights as evidenced by the fact that it’s not an amendment – in order to “promote the Progress” of the arts. Without these laws in place, there could be no enforcement of any kind of protections, or limits on the usage of another person’s intellectual property.

So while it may feel nice to think that in a perfect world all artists and their works would be protected without the need for government oversight, the cold hard fact remains that copyright is governed by a series of laws; so if you want some redress in the even that your intellectual property is stolen, get thee to Form PA.

But How Do I Register?
As I said earlier, copyright registration could hardly be easier.

Whereas a composer used to have to get Form PA (for Performing Arts, which we shared with playwrights, filmmakers, choreographers, and recording artists), there’s now one online form for most types of registrations, Form eCO.

The advantages of eCO over the paper forms are pretty huge. First and foremost is the lower filing fee. Remember how I said earlier that I paid $65 for the registration of my Sonata? The paper version is still $65, but the online form is a whopping $35. Much easier on the pocketbook!

There’s also a much faster processing time thanks to the lack of paper. Transmission is immediate, nobody needs to sort through stacks of mail and forward them to the appropriate department, and there’s no sloppy handwriting to decipher. Everybody wins! Except maybe the post office….

You can also track the status of your registration, which is nigh on impossible with paper applications.

I just took a moment to go through Form eCO with one of my recent compositions, and it took me a whole five minutes to get through the registration. Definitions and instructions abound, and are very, very, very readable – they’re there to help you understand what you’re doing, not confuse you – and the form tailors itself to your needs – almost nothing is extraneous.

Alas, and alack, I would not recommend (again, this ≠ legal advice) registering works as a collection, unless they are unpublished. (If your works are available to the public, including through your own website, they are considered published.) The Copyright Office’s various publications and sets of instructions repeatedly say not to do it. That said, if you feel compelled to register your separately-published works as a collection, be it on your head.

To learn more about copyright and registration, check out the various publications available at the U.S. Copyright Office website. Also, I highly recommend Stephen Fishman’s The Copyright Handbook, available from the excellent Nolo Press. The ebook version of The Copyright Handbook is on both of my computers, my phone, and my tablet so that it’s available any time I might have questions. I’m a big fan of Nolo, which is a great online legal resource, with many free articles and lots of information. In fact, tonight, one of my favorite online book stores had an amazing sale, so I snagged a handful of Nolo’s books to add to my collection.

The Poor Man’s Copyright
“But $35 to register each work is still too expensive,” I hear you say. “Can’t I just use the Poor Man’s Copyright?” To which I repeat: copyright registration is required in order to file suit for copyright infringement.

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, the poor man’s copyright refers to the practice of sealing a newly-finished work in an envelope and mailing to yourself. The postmark on the envelope, according to this myth, establishes the date of copyright so that anyone attempting to infringe on the copyright at a later date will be foiled in court when the postmarked envelope containing the copyrighted work is produced as evidence.

All well and good, but again: without registration, there can be no infringement suit. And with registration, you’ve only wasted a perfectly good envelope and the cost of postage.

So let us hearken back two weeks to my exhortation to think like a business. Your registration with the Copyright Office is two things: an investment and insurance.

You’re investing in your security as a business, and in the future of your works. You’re also insuring – for a one-time fee, rather than a monthly premium – that should the unthinkable happen, you’re protected against the bulk of your loss. You may, in fact, come out ahead financially, depending on the severity of the infringement and the damages that you are awarded.

If you have catching up to do, do it. Do one piece a week if you can, or one a month, or one every other month. But get it done – protect yourself and your work.

Make copyright registration a part of your self-publishing process. And if you’re nervous about the forms, do a couple of dry runs first – fill some out for different works in your catalog, but don’t submit them, just shred them before doing it for real

So who’s registering works this week? I know I have a bit of catching up to do.

I write the Composer’s Guide here once a week, taking time away from my composing to do so. If this post helped you in any way, please leave a tip or a small donation on the way out. If you can’t afford to donate, please pass this chapter along to someone who you think might get some help from it.

Thanks!