Okay, here’s the no-bullshit rundown on music rights:
Rumblefish tracks your REGISTERED output that they have issued toward the downstream marketing outlets both online and brick & mortar, if any remain.
Your song is tracked by YOUR WAVEFORMS, not by codes or numbers. That means that any “cover” of your song will NOT be monetized for you unless the covering artist is legit and registers their song as a cover of your song, but that’s another story and it gets really messy to try to force others to respect your song rights.
Here’s the best you can do at the moment, and it’s enough to generate millions of dollars if you play it right:
You get paid for your song track if recognized by google as the same song registered with rumblefish via cdbaby.com which automatically pays you for any monetized use on youtube and other connected venues…automatically.
It matters not whether you have all the copyright info on the song. As a matter of fact, the best thing that could happen to you is that someone steals your song, rips your soundtrack over which you sweated & strained for so long, and uses it as a music bed for a viral video.
Face it, you’re not going to ever make a viral video, and even if you did, wouldn’t it be a lot cooler, better, more delightful, in fact, to see your music in collab with a multi-million hit video that’s making you money while you do other things you’d rather do, like make more music???
Okay, so here’s the bottom line:
Put your music through the hoops at cdbaby.com. Make absolutely CERTAIN that you’re covered for synch rights on youtube, which is an extra maybe ten bucks, but whatever it is, it’s bloody worth it, and you don’t want to go through the cdbaby process over again if you screw it up the first time!!! It costs about $35 to register, but it’s not an easy process — they want a lot of information.
And speaking of information, that’s where you want all your personnel info, your music rights, publishing info, all that jazz, NOT on youtube, where nobody gives a flying fluke…but you DO post a link to the purchase page for the song on cdbaby.com!!! That you do for sure!!! They’ll also post a link, but don’t count on it, unless you’re considered a major player on youtube, which means a brand or partner channel, and that means cash out of pocket for you, if you go that route, and many music publishers and producers do just that.
Bottom line:
Post your music without information, and place an annotation somewhere on it, saying “please steal this song!”. It worked for Abby Hoffman!