How to Check if a Song Is Registered With the Copyright Office

The official record is the U.S. Copyright Office catalog. You can search it yourself at publicrecords.copyright.gov, pay the Office’s research division $200 per hour with a two hour minimum to search for you, or run your songs through our free name search, which checks the same USCO records instantly. The one thing you cannot do is assume. Copyright exists automatically when a song is fixed, but registration is a separate, voluntary step, and there is no notification system that tells you whether it ever happened.

The Copyright Public Records System covers registrations from 1978 to the present. It replaced the old CoCatalog that many older guides still link to. It is free, it is the authoritative source, and it is genuinely hard to use for music: songs are indexed under the songwriters’ legal names, not artist names, titles are often filed under an album or group registration rather than the single, and common titles return hundreds of unrelated claims. A thorough manual check of one song routinely takes fifteen or twenty minutes, and a false “not found” is easy to get if you search the stage name instead of the legal name.

The Office’s Records Research and Certification Division will run the search for you at $200 per hour with a two hour minimum, so a commissioned search starts at $400 per request, and an expedited report runs $500 per hour. That service exists mainly for litigation, where a certified search report becomes evidence. It is the right tool if you are already in a lawsuit. It is the wrong tool for an artist who just wants to know where their catalog stands.

We index roughly 6.3 million USCO music registrations and search them the way musicians actually think: by song and writer. The name search is free for a quick look at a writer or artist. The catalog check takes your whole release list and flags each song’s registration status in one pass; the per-song detail is part of the $10 Audit Pack. One honest caveat we publish everywhere: official USCO bulk data lags roughly a year behind current filings, so a song registered in the last twelve months may not appear yet.

Registration is what turns automatic ownership into enforcement power. Registered before an infringement, or within three months of release, you can claim statutory damages of $750 to $30,000 per work, up to $150,000 if willful, plus attorney’s fees. Unregistered, you cannot even file the suit. The same gap shows up in paperwork deals: publishers, sync licensors, and estate buyers all check the federal record, and a catalog that looks owned but is not registered is a weaker asset in every one of those conversations. If the check turns up gaps, registering is a 30 minute job that costs $45 to $65 per filing.