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A Garage Band’s Guide to IP

So, you are in a band. You found a singer who comes to rehearsals sober, a drummer who can count to four, a bassist who does more than just holding a door and a guitarist who knows scales other than the minor pentatonic. Your amps don’t hiss, your G strings stay in tune and you don’t have to share space with “sacred” old rusty trumpets that your landlord insists on storing in the rehearsal room you rent. You regularly play local gigs and hope to sign a recording deal and go on tour soon. Your fanbase grows, you start recognising faces of random people who come to all of your shows and know all of your lyrics. Your band has a name and logo that everyone recognises and your merch sales are enough to pay your rehearsal room’s rent. Everything seems to be in order.

However, one thing is not - your intellectual property.

I once was in your shoes - I am a musician myself. Before working in IP, at 17, I started my own band that lives to this day under the name Mr. Wh!te.

Most of our fellow local bands have little to no idea how IP actually works and have gaps that could seriously hinder their further development. According to my observations, IP in bands is usually only taken care of if professional management is involved. The management are the ones to address the IP issues first - musicians themselves rarely deal with them on their own initiative.

This article will hopefully become your practical guide to IP. I will help you navigate the complex world of IP as a young musician and make sense of your band’s IP assets in a language that even bass players can understand.

General info

Intellectual property rights apply to non-tangible assets. There are many different types of IP rights. However, at this stage, only two are relevant to your band - copyright and its related rights and trademarks.

Copyright

Copyright protects original artistic works - in your case - songs, album covers, band photos from photoshoots and concerts and any other artwork, by giving their author the exclusive right to dispose of the work and to stop any unauthorised use of it.

Disposal would be reproduction, copying, distribution, display or communication to the public, creation of derivative works (covers, remixes), unauthorised use is all of the above actions, but done by third parties without the author’s consent - so if a beer brand puts your chorus in an advert without asking, that’s your cue to call a lawyer, not to feel flattered. This also means that you are not allowed to freely record and publish covers of protected music belonging to others (yes, even if you credit the authors and no, fair use will most likely not save you) or use it as your opening song. To do that legally, you have to ask the rights holders (usually the label) for a licence - a right to use the copyrighted work. Different types of licences exist - the topic of licensing is complex and deserves an article of its own.

Today, copyright mostly protects human creations - AI-assisted or AI-generated art gets little to no protection. If you used Claude Design to generate your album cover - I might have bad news. This matter evolves as I write this article and in a few years we might have more conclusive answers to questions of copyright protection of AI-assisted and AI-generated art.

Copyright is automatic and, thanks to global treaties, almost worldwide. Your song is protected since the moment it’s fixed in some tangible form (for example, recorded on a phone at a rehearsal or written down in sheet music). Some countries have optional copyright registration procedures, usually fairly simple and low-cost. In the US, for instance, you can register your work with the US Copyright Office. If you are based in one of these states, I highly recommend registering your copyright, as it gives you real advantages should things ever go to court.

Copyright lasts long: generally the author’s life plus 70 years. After the author’s death, they pass to their estate. Your grandchildren could still argue about royalties on your hits. After that term, however, protected works ascend into the public domain and become free to use by anyone. This is why Yngwie Malmsteen got away with recording so many arrangements of Vivaldi, Bach and Paganini without ever getting in any trouble. This also means you could freely use paintings by Van Gogh or Monet for album covers (even though I can’t imagine why would you want to), but should stay away from Dalí or Picasso for another couple of decades (written in 2026).

Some countries, namely, most European states, recognise that copyright comes in two flavours - economic rights and moral rights. Economic rights are the ones that make money - you can sell them, sign them away to a label or licence them. Moral rights are more personal: the right to be named as the author and the right to object to distortions of your work that harm your reputation - say, your anti-war anthem being remixed into a recruitment jingle. In most countries, you can’t waive or sell moral rights, so your name stays on the recordings even if a label owns them.

One song contains several separate rights. The composition (music, lyrics arrangement) belongs to whoever wrote it. The sound recording has its own, separate protection - these are the “related rights” - belonging to whoever produced the recording, with performers holding rights in their performances too.

So, agree your splits in writing while you still like each other. Contrary to what you might think, bands rarely break up over musical differences - usually, disputes over who owns a song get them.

Also, join a collecting society - they collect royalties when your songs are played on radio, at venues or streamed - money that otherwise evaporates. They also help identify the owner of the rights, where a licence is required.

The author, i.e. the person who created the work holds the copyright for it. This means that, for example, unless there was a transfer of rights, photos of your live performance belong to your friends who took them.

A word on the famous “poor man’s copyright” - mailing yourself a demo in a sealed envelope to prove it existed on a given date. It sounds clever at rehearsal-room legal seminars, but proves very little, as envelopes can be steamed open, mailed unsealed, or stuffed later, and courts treat them accordingly - with suspicion, if at all. It also doesn’t create any rights, as copyright exists whether or not you’ve bribed a postman. If you want solid proof of the date your song existed, better options exist: registration where available (like the US Copyright Office), depositing the work with a notary or your collecting society, or timestamped digital services. Even dated emails to your bandmates beat an envelope gathering dust in a drawer.

Trademarks

Trademarks are protected signs that distinguish one company’s products and services from those of other companies. Anything could potentially become a trademark - a name, a word, a slogan, a logo, an odour, a jingle.

At this stage, your band name and logo (and, if you have one, the mascot, like Iron Maiden’s Eddie the Head) should receive trademark protection.

Unlike copyright, they are not automatic - you have to register them, and until you do, another band called exactly what you’re called with the same logo, as the one your drummer’s artsy girlfriend came up with can appear in the next town over and there may be nothing you can do about it.

Trademarks are registered for specific goods and services. For matters of trademark registration, all goods and services in the world have been classified in 45 classes (International Classification of Goods and Services / Nice Classification). For a band, the usual suspects are class 9 (recordings - CDs, vinyls, cassettes), class 25 (clothing - your merch) and class 41 (entertainment services - your live shows; content creation and publication - your music on streaming platforms). Some jurisdictions, like Switzerland, will allow you to file one application in several classes, while in other so-called single class jurisdictions, like Malta, you must file a separate application for each class.

Trademark registration costs money - usually, a fixed basic fee including one or several classes and an additional fee for each added class. For example, as of 2026, it costs 250 GBP for one class and 60 GBP for each extra class in the UK, or 450 CHF for three classes and 100 CHF for each extra class in Switzerland. The fee is to be paid in advance, before the trademark examination starts. Most offices today offer a possibility to file electronically, and online filings are often subject to discounts to save paper. For instance, a 45 GBP discount on the basic fee for an online filing is offered in the UK. Similarly, you can save 100 CHF in Switzerland by e-filing.

If you choose to e-file your trademark application - beware of fraud. Other websites may attempt to impersonate the government and charge you money. Make sure you file through your country’s government’s official platform.

Trademark registrations last 10 years and are renewable forever for 10 year terms - unlike, sadly, most bands. The renewal is also subject to a fee - as of 2026, 245 GBP in the UK or 550 CHF in Switzerland.

To register a trademark, you should apply with your national trademark office (USPTO in the US, INPI in France etc…), or, in some countries, the ministry of economy.

The trademark office will examine your application for absolute grounds for refusal - problems with the trademark itself. A trademark can’t lack distinctiveness - be descriptive with regard to the goods and services it represents (i.e. Apple for computers - good, Apple for an apple wholesaler - descriptive), consist solely of laudatory terms (e.g. Excellent Pizzas for a pizzeria - descriptive and laudatory), mislead customers (i.e. Artemis Swiss for products manufactured in Germany) or create confusion with a state flag or coat of arms. If a trademark is any of these, the application will be rejected.

Offices in some countries will also examine a trademark application for relative grounds for refusal - whether your trademark creates any risk of confusion with a prior trademark covering the same goods and services, and will reject your application if it does. Others, like the IPI in Switzerland, leave it to the market - the office will register your trademark even if it conflicts with a prior one, and it’s up to the owner of the earlier trademark to act against your application. If you are based in one of these states, once your trademark is registered - watch out for conflicts with your mark yourself.

Rejections, or, as we call them, provisional refusals of protection can be appealed.

If the procedure concludes that your trademark can be registered, the authority will issue a certificate of protection.

The procedure’s duration depends on many factors. According to my experience in Switzerland, if a trademark is strong prima facie, you will obtain the certificate of protection within a week from filing, but if it is weaker and more in-depth analysis of absolute grounds is required, it could take up to three months. In the UK, the office claims it usually takes 3-6 months after filing to obtain a certificate. One of the worst offenders is India - colleagues report serious backlog in trademark examinations. You could spend 2-3 years waiting for your certificate.

If you don’t actually use your trademark in the country you registered it in for some time (usually 2-5 years depending on the jurisdiction), a third party can have it cancelled for non-use.

Also, unlike copyright, trademark law disregards whether the object of the protection is human-made or not. So, your logo could be entirely AI-generated and still protectable, as long as it meets the aforementioned criteria.

See your country’s office’s practice and applicable law to clarify any of these details.

In case of rejection or annulment, the official fees you paid to have your trademark registered will not be refunded, as you are essentially paying for the examination, which needs to be done in any case.

Be sure that you are registering the right thing in the right classes. Some offices are more flexible than others, but, in most countries, once the application is filed, it is basically carved in stone.

So, you might actually lose money if you don’t do your homework before filing.

Registration is territorial, so start with your home country and expand as your touring map does using the Madrid System for International Trademark Protection - you request international registration from the office, you select the classes and the states you want it registered in, and the office asks the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) to send your application to the offices of the countries you selected. The offices then conduct their own examinations based on their own laws and practice. Of course, you can also file national trademarks directly in these countries, but that requires having a local representative and becomes more expensive if you need more than 2-3 countries. Usually, as a rule of thumb, for cost efficiency, we recommend using the Madrid route if registration in more than 3 countries is needed.

To avoid trouble, before you commit to using a certain name, logo or mascot, I highly recommend searching it in the trademark register to see whether anyone has registered anything similar before. If you are not sure of yourself - in some countries, the offices themselves offer preliminary search services of great quality for moderate fees. Make sure to base your decision to file on fresh search results. You shouldn’t rely on results of a search that is not recent, as other conflicting trademarks could have been registered since the search. In Switzerland, we are lucky to have an efficient and user-friendly national trademark database (Swissreg) that makes preliminary searches a breeze. Your country’s trademark search system may not be as good - in that case, use international free search tools, such as TMView by the European Union’s Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) or WIPO’s Global Brand Database.

Decide who owns the trademark, because if the trademark is registered in the frontman’s name and the frontman leaves, he might legally take the band’s name with him - leaving the rest of you as the world’s most experienced tribute act to yourselves. Register it in the name of all members, a band company or non-profit, and write down what happens if someone quits.

I suggest taking a look at trademark databases for trademark portfolios of bands. You will see in practice, what do they register and how do they do it.

Why bother?

Fair question. Everything above involves boring paperwork, fees and phrases like “absolute grounds for refusal”, and you got into music precisely to avoid becoming the kind of person who enjoys those. However, it’s the boring paperwork that decides whether the band gets the money from the deals or just watches it all go to someone else. Realise that you don’t actually own your IP until you have been through the boring paperwork and IP happens to be the only asset of your band that can make money while you sleep.

Every time your song is streamed, played on the radio, covered by another band or synced into a film, series or advert, someone owes the rights holders money. A single sync placement in the right Netflix show can out-earn a year of weekly gigs, but only reaches whoever actually owns the rights and registered with a collecting society.

Iron Maiden turned Eddie the Head into a trademark empire spanning t-shirts, video games and beer, KISS licensed their name and painted faces onto everything from pinball machines to coffins - yes, you can be buried in a KISS Kasket.

A well-kept catalogue is an asset you can one day sell or borrow against. David Bowie figured this out back in 1997, raising $55 million in “Bowie Bonds” backed by nothing but his future royalties.

And the numbers at the top are staggering - Bob Dylan sold his songwriting catalogue for a reported $300-400 million, then his recordings for another ~$200 million, Bruce Springsteen got around $550 million from Sony, Queen’s catalogue went for over $1 billion in 2024 - the biggest music deal in history and KISS sold their catalogue, name, likeness and makeup designs for over $300 million. Rest assured that none of them sounded better than you in their first rehearsal room.

The cautionary tale that ties it all together is Taylor Swift, whose old label owned the master recordings of her first six albums instead of her, and sold them out from under her. As she still owned the compositions, she re-recorded the albums as “Taylor’s Versions”, collapsed the value of the old masters, and in 2025 finally bought them back for a reported $360 million.

The other side of the ledger is the money and time you don’t lose - IP litigation costs tens of thousands of dollars and takes years of your time. Compared to that, a few hundred bucks spent on a trademark registration start looking like nothing, right?

The Verve built “Bitter Sweet Symphony” on an uncleared orchestral sample of a Rolling Stones song and ended up surrendering 100% of the songwriting royalties on it, Jagger and Richards only handed the rights back as a gesture of goodwill more than twenty years later.

A band could end up like the Sugababes or Pink Floyd - the former being a band that gradually replaced every original member, leaving the three founders legally unable to perform under the name they created, the latter’s members having spent the late ’80s litigating over who was Pink Floyd after Roger Waters left.

A scenario where a band exists as two rival versions, touring simultaneously and suing each other while confusing fans and promoters alike, like L.A. Guns or Great White is also very realistic.

You will agree that ending up in such situations is not particularly desirable. I also guarantee that each one of these musicians told themselves they wished they’d dealt with these questions while everyone was still sharing a rehearsal room and before big money was involved.

Dealing with your IP is very similar to working out, obtaining a degree or planning your retirement - it’s painful to do in the moment, but your future self would probably thank you for doing it nonetheless. So, the main thing to ask yourself is - what do you want to do with your band? Is it nothing serious - you are just fooling around with friends and will probably quit next year? Then yes, feel free to skip the boring paperwork and get back to setting the intonation on your Pacifica. However, if your ambitions go beyond that - call your bandmates for a meeting and deal with the paperwork, before the paperwork deals with you.