How to Check if a Song Is Copyrighted

Start with the short answer: almost every song you can name is copyrighted. Protection is automatic from the moment a work is fixed in a recording — no registration, no notice, no symbol required. So “is this song copyrighted?” is rarely the question worth asking.

The useful question is: am I cleared to use it, in this way, on this platform? Those are different, and the second one is what determines whether you have a problem.

There are two copyrights in every song

This trips up most people, and it explains why permission from one party is often not enough.

• The composition — the underlying music and lyrics. Usually controlled by songwriters and their publishers.
• The recording — the specific performance you are hearing, often called the master. Usually controlled by a label.

Using a recording in a video generally touches both. Recording your own cover version avoids the master but not the composition. This is why “I found it on a free download site” resolves nothing.

A method that actually works

1. Identify the recording precisely. Not the title — the ISRC where you can get it. Copyrighted tracks are routinely uploaded under unrelated names, sped up, or slowed down, and the display name is frequently wrong.
2. Find the rights holders. Streaming services credit the label on the release; publishing and writer splits are searchable through the collecting societies in your territory.
3. Establish the license you are relying on. Not whether the track is available to you — what permits your specific use. In-app library, production library subscription, or a direct sync license.
4. Check that license covers your context. Commercial or brand use, the platform you are posting to, and the territories you are posting in.

Step four is where most checks quietly fail.

Personal use and brand use are not the same permission

The music you can add to a personal post is generally licensed for personal, non-commercial use. That is why TikTok maintains a separate Commercial Music Library for business accounts, and why Meta separates its Sound Collection from the sounds available on personal profiles.

If the account sells something, or the post promotes something, you are in the commercial category — regardless of how organic the video looks.

Worth knowing

In the United States, statutory damages run to $150,000 per work where infringement is found to be willful. That is a ceiling rather than a prediction, and settlements are typically a fraction of it — but the unit is the work, so a single track used across several posts is not a single exposure.

Four things that are not clearance

• The track was in the app. Libraries change, and availability on a personal device says nothing about a business account.
• Nothing happened. No claim is not the same as no infringement. Enforcement is periodic and retrospective.
• You credited the artist. Attribution is not a license, and no license requires it in place of permission.
• It was labelled copyright-free. That phrase has no legal meaning. Someone owns it; the question is what they permit.

If you are responsible for a brand account

Checking one track is the easy half. The harder and more useful question is what is already sitting in your published history — every post, back to the first upload, judged against the license terms that applied when it went up. That is an audit rather than a lookup.

More on how that works in the blog, or talk to us if you want to know where your estate actually stands.