Martin,

The first question you would need to ask yourself is whether you have the passion and desire to fight for a copyright violation against someone who potentially stole your song. If you are willing to pay for the legal support for that, then I would recommend that you follow whatever copyright registration convention exist in the UK.

In the US, they've made the registration process rather simple - surprisingly so. It's the defense of the copyright registration where the difficulty and the big dollars can be spent.

I think most of us posting original content for others to listen to realize that this is probably all the audience we will have - but you know what - we're o.k. with that.

Now, if I really wanted to make a push to generate income with original songs, I would take a slightly different approach. I would only post snippets, perhaps 1 minute versions at reasonable quality, of original songs.

Until I make that push, I'm happy with the couple hundred or so listeners I have on-line.

You have to make this call for yourself - am I posting songs to make money, or to share my art, or to try to combine the two? If you can seriously answer that question, then you are well on your way to answering your original question. Every time I consider trying to combine the two, it starts to feel and smell like work - which is not what I want it to be. There is also a fear of the unknown that comes into play. What if I think my songs are really good like my couple hundred listeners tell me, but the fact is that they are just being nice, or have poor judgment of what is popular? The thing is that today's media outlets, particularly the internet and some savvy using it to one's advantage, allow one to get a much better feel for that than say a guy playing songs in his barn in the middle of Oklahoma back in the 1960's.

If you want to make money on your music as you have performed it, then it's almost a foregone conclusion you have to have media content on-line in an easy to use fashion. Some of that might mean giveaway of songs. I'm on mailing lists for some popular bands (switchfoot and coldplay) and both of them send along a freebie song now and then - which means that nearly instantly those songs are on some illegal download website.

The choice is really up to you. If your stuff is that good, people will steal it. But some of that stealing might be what actually gets you noticed.

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