Copyright: What's mine?

Understanding copyright and where your work stands with it as an artist is one of the most crucial business elements of the music industry. I retain full copyright under an All Rights Reserved license on almost all my tracks public on SoundCloud. The exception is tracks like 'Sundays' where I have used a sample given out under a creative-commons non-commercial license, that one in particular I am able to use it as I like but can not sell it commercially.

I incorporate a fair amount of sampling into many of my tracks including a recent one made called 'Attitude'. When I look for samples I always visit sites like Sampleswap.org or Loopmasters for sounds which are fully given up to the public domain and are royalty free. This means I can use these files for any commercial purposes, and alter them into my own compositions. In every song there are two separate forms of copyright:

1) the composition (music + lyrics)

2) the sound recording (recording + performance on recording)

So for Attitude and I Can, I heavily edited multiple sample phrases to create a new melodic vocal line. Therefore I now hold full copyright over the new composition (melody) of the vocals and also the way in which I have edited them (the altered recording).

As a musician in Australia, I am an artist member with APRA AMCOS. APRA basically takes a lot of work out of administration and licensing for your music. They provide a stream for artists to receive royalties for their music when performed, played at a venue or aired on radio and TV. For me, most of my royalties has been from triple j and triple j Unearthed airplays. There has also been some small portions from license fees which venues like cafes purchase in order to play the radio or TV music stations.

For a really great visual explanation on royalty streams for communication & performance, check out this PDF.