I. Setting up a copyright owner
Each song that is claimed must be associated with an “Owner.” An Owner is a person who owns a copyright registered with the U.S. Copyright Office (or for which an application for registration has been filed) for a musical composition. In order to proceed and select songs on this site to include in a claim, you first need to create an Owner. You will have the opportunity to create different Owners under one user account, if necessary.
If you create multiple Owners, make sure you select the correct Owner under your user account that will be associated with any songs claimed.
Please click on the grey button “Create Owner” to set up an owner.
Please fill in the full legal name of the owner and the GCG ID if available (The GCG ID is the GCG Provided ID generated upon owner registration at www.spotifypublishingsettlement.com) and then click on the blue button “Create”
If you want to set up multiple owners under your user account, please click on the grey “Create Owner” button to set up another owner, otherwise click on the blue “Use this owner” button to search under the owner you have just set up.
II. Searching for tracks and selecting tracks to include in your claim
To begin your track search, click on the dark blue “search” button in the top right hand corner of the screen.
Please enter the information for the tracks you wish to search for (artist/track name/album/album label as available) and then click on the blue “Search” button to perform the search.
You can also search for tracks by ISRC or Spotify Track ID if you have this information, by clicking on the “Search by ISRC or Spotify Track ID” link in the top left of the screen. To return to the search by artist/track name etc., please click the “General Search” link in the top left of the screen.
Search results will be organized in individual rows for each track. The search results are based on an exact match of the text submitted for a search. Unless otherwise noted, all track data accessible from this site and all data utilized for performing a track search was received from Spotify and has not been modified. Some search results may contain what will appear as duplicate track matching results that will be displayed on separate rows. This is because the track data received from Spotify may contain instances assigning multiple Spotify track IDs to the same track in their data.
If the search results appear to display duplicate results, you must select all rows displayed to add to your user/owner account as a claim. For each track selected for inclusion in a claim (including any apparent duplications) you will also need to add the Copyright Registration Number and the claimed song ownership percentage, either by entering them after you have selected a track for inclusion in a claim or after you have exported your claims data from your user account, as these are required fields in order to submit a Claims Form to GCG.
To see more search results, if any, scroll down to the bottom of the screen and click on the blue “Load More” button.
Click on the boxes on the left of the search result rows for any tracks you wish to include in your claim. To add these selected tracks to your claim, click on the orange button “Add Selected (x) track(s) to Owner xxxx” which appears above the search results once one or more search result rows are selected.
Before you add the selected tracks to your claim, you have the option in the next screen of providing the copyright registration number and ownership % for each selected track, although these can also be added at a later stage. Click on the blue button “Add Track(s) to Owner XXXX” to add the tracks to your claim.
The rows for the tracks added to your claim will now be greyed out in the search results and a message in orange will appear above the search results which shows the number of tracks just added to the specific Owner. To view your tracks selected for inclusion in your claim click the “View All Claims” link above the search results. Tracks selected may appear in other search results conducted, but the rows will be in grey to reflect that you have already included the track under your user account for an Owner.
The tracks selected for inclusion in your claim are displayed on the screen along with any information added manually for the copyright registration number and ownership %.
III. Searching for copyright registration numbers
If you do not know the copyright registration number for your tracks selected for inclusion in your claim, you can search for these numbers using the copyright registration number search tool on the portal.
Click on “Search and Retrieve Copyright Registration Numbers” button in the middle top of the screen to start this process.
Enter separately the last and first names (as they appear on the registration, including suffixes) of the writers associated with the claimed track in the “Writer Name” input field. You can enter multiple names by continuing to click Add Writer after each one. You do not need to enter all of the writer names for each claimed track in order to conduct the search.
Click “Add Writer” to add the writers to your copyright registration number search. The writers you add will appear just below the writer name input field and the writer name input field will become available again in case you want to add another writer before you perform your copyright registration number search.
To add another writer, repeat the process of entering the writer last name and first name in the writer name input field and then click “Add Writer”
Once you have added the writer name(s) associated with the claimed track, click "Perform Copyright Registration Number Search" in order to conduct a match of your claimed tracks information against the LOC Records to bring back potential matches and the associated copyright registration numbers. If potential matches are found, they will appear as blue numbers below the copyright reg. # field.
To read about the source of the Copyright Registration Data, you can click on the button “Information About The Copyright Registration Data”.
Click on the blue number search results below the copyright reg. # field to view a pop up window with more details of the potential copyright registration number match (Title, Authors, Performer and Registration Date).
If you need further copyright registration details, full copyright registration records are also available through the LOC’s online copyright public records catalog at http://cocatalog.loc.gov.
If this copyright registration number is a correct match for your claimed track, click on the “+” symbol to the right of the blue copyright registration number to add the number into the copyright reg. # field.
Only one copyright registration number can be associated with each track claimed under an Owner on this portal.
Click on the grey “Go Back to View All Claims” button to see the copyright registration number added to your tracks selected for inclusion in your claim.
IV. Exporting claim information to Claim Form for submission to the Settlement Administrator
In order to export claim information to a Claim Form for submission to the Settlement Administrator, click on the blue “Export to Excel file(.XLSX)” button.
The Excel file(.XLSX) that is generated will be saved to your local computer, usually in the folder “downloads” depending on your computer’s local settings. The file contains additional information associated with the songs claimed and additional data columns that are needed for submitting Claim Forms to GCG, including any information that you have added to the songs you have claimed.
In order to open the Excel file(.XLSX) in a spreadsheet application such as excel, please save the text file to a designated place on your computer and then open your chosen spreadsheet application, select the text file from within the spreadsheet application (make sure to display ‘all files’ in order to see the text file in the location you saved it), and then open the file (In many cases there is a text import wizard. Using the wizard you will need to select ‘delimited’ as the file type (step 1) and ‘tab’ as the delimiter (step 2), after which you can select finish and see the data.) Expand your columns to view data, as needed.
Please note that both the Copyright Registration Number and the claimed song ownership percentage are required fields in order to submit a Claims Form to the Claims Administrator. If you have not already done so, you can enter this information into these fields now in order to include them in your claims output file or you can manually input them at a later stage prior to submitting your Claim Form to GCG.
V. Submitting Claims Form to GCG
Finalized claims are required to be submitted to GCG, the Settlement Claims Administrator.
You cannot submit a Claims Form directly from this portal to GCG.
Once you have created a user account for this portal you can select songs to be claimed and then use the claims output file exported from this portal to assist you with submitting a Claims Form. For details on how to submit a claim to the Claims Administrator please visit http://www.spotifypublishingsettlement.com/
Last Modified: January 22, 2018
