When you write an original song or composition, UK law gives you a set of exclusive rights over how that work is used. These rights are the legal basis for every licence, royalty and payment you receive. They are set out in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA), and they belong to you automatically from the moment of creation.
The exclusive rights
As the copyright owner, you have the exclusive right to authorise or prohibit:
- Reproduction – making copies of your work in any form, including physical media, downloads, and streaming
- Distribution – issuing copies of your work to the public
- Public performance – performing your work in public, whether live or through playback
- Communication to the public – broadcasting your work on radio or TV, or transmitting it via the internet (including streaming)
- Adaptation – making arrangements, translations or other derivative versions of your work
- Making available – putting your work online so that members of the public can access it at a time and place of their choosing (this is the right that underpins on-demand streaming)
In practice, you do not license each of these individually for every use. The music industry groups them into mechanical rights (reproduction and distribution) and performing rights (performance, communication and making available), and collective management organisations – PRS and MCPS in the UK – administer them on your behalf through blanket licences.
How long these rights last
Your copyright lasts for your lifetime plus 70 years. The 70-year period begins on 1 January following the year of your death. During that time, your estate controls the copyright and continues to earn from it.
For co-written works, the term runs from the death of the last surviving co-writer, so the song remains in copyright for 70 years after that person dies. Once the term expires, the work enters the public domain.
That duration applies across the UK and the EU. Other territories may differ – several countries use a term of life plus 50 years, which is the minimum set by the Berne Convention (the principal international copyright treaty, to which most countries are signatories). If your songs earn internationally, the applicable term in each territory is governed by local law.
Lyrics as a separate copyright
Lyrics receive copyright protection as a literary work, separate from the musical composition. If you write only lyrics, you own the copyright in those words. If a co-writer composes the music, you each own your respective contributions – the lyricist owns the lyrics and the composer owns the music, unless you agree to treat the finished song as a single joint work with percentage splits.
Because lyrics and music are legally separable, lyrics can be licensed independently for uses such as printed songbooks, merchandise, or lyric display on digital platforms. Streaming services increasingly require separate lyric licences to show words on screen, and companies such as Musixmatch license lyric data across platforms. If you write lyrics, your words are a distinct licensable asset, even where the song as a whole is administered as one work for royalty purposes.
In most co-writing situations, the industry convention is to treat the finished song as a single work and divide ownership by agreed percentage shares between all contributors, regardless of whether each person contributed words, music, or both. But the underlying legal position – that lyrics and music are separable – matters if you are a specialist lyricist or if a dispute arises over individual contributions.
