Use condom m8

For the most part, don't bother.  It's a losing battle.  You are better off having people want to support you than you are fighting them on it, especially since, as I said a moment ago, you will lose, so engage with your fanbase, treat them like your friends (genuinely), and they will support you. 

Don't fret about the folks who don't give you money... heck, even those people are supporting you by giving you mindshare, which is still a valuable resource.  If they like your track enough to download it without paying for it, then they might also tell their friends "Yo, dude, check this track out!"  If they're DJs, maybe they'll play your track at the club, and somebody who will pay you might hear it.


We've seen how well protection has worked for the music and movie industry to date.  They are failing at copy protection.  You are not a multi-billion dollar industry, you won't manage better than they have.

Give out enough free music that people don't feel like they need to steal the stuff you ask them to pay for.

Yeah, but ripping music off of YT/SC gets you shitty mp3s that have been shoved through a limiting algorithm (at least w/ YT, idk if soundcloud autolimits their tracks). Anything that isn't an explicitly free download I go buy on beatport - to support the artist in some small way, to keep myself honest (if I would want people to buy my music, why would I not buy someone else's?), and most importantly to get those sweet, sweet uncompressed WAV files.

I've used a few different soundcloud rippers before and you can hear the difference between them and the beatport mp3 or the itunes m4a (and definitely between it and the uncompressed wav) - specifically in the high end. I think if you're a DJ, it's important to go for the highest quality files because the bigger the speaker, the more obvious the degradation.

That being said, as long as there is a culture which says artwork is inherently less valuable because it is pure aesthetics or entertainment there will be people who pirate music. As long as there are people who despise the concepts of capitalism and/or privacy/secrecy/personal ownership ("You can't own land, man."), there will be people who ignore trademarks and copyrights. You'll have to work within the culture, or work to change it.

So I think your real worry is more what OP mentioned about being ripped off by labels, and about having your music stolen by other producers trying to make it.

The way to avoid being screwed over by a publisher or label is to read your contracts BEFORE you sign them, and brush up on some contract law and what rights you have. Labels have a goal: making money. You having everything go your way does not accomplish that goal. Them having total control over you and your content does. Be aware of that, and look at your options.

The best way to avoid getting your music ripped off is 1. Don't share WIPS and finished but unreleased tracks with people you don't know or people you don't trust! That includes on this forum, by the way. 2. Have records that your work is YOUR work, with verifiable pieces of timestamping. Email the project or the wav file to yourself, have it posted on multiple media platforms that you can prove are really you, put it on a CD or a thumb drive and mail it postmarked to yourself and leave it sealed, etc. 3. Start archiving and versioning your projects, and be really anal about your file management. If you can show the multiple iterations of your song leading into the final product, you'll have a much better case than the person who just reposted the .wav and called it something else.

or more importantly, how to protect your work from other "artists" claiming it as their own.

I feel like this is the kind of thing you just stumble upon, or else your fans do it for you.

To protect your music from people trying to take your rights from it or claim its their own: the minute you create something, you own the copyright to that, and unless you sign a contract signing AWAY that ownership, it will be yours until the end of your life +70 years. However, that is difficult to prove. As Steven Gold said below, registering with ASCAP, BMI, or the copyright office gives you absolute proof of your ownership for a fee.

To protect your music from labels and sketchy contracts: First, get legal counseling for a contract. It's important. Secondly, consider whether this label is worth it. You are signing them off the rights to your Intellectual Property (IP), which means you can no longer use it freely (in commercials, for example). If you want to exploit this piece in the future, then reconsider. Thirdly, consider if you can negotiate for the contract to be more accommodating for you as an artist. I'd recommend sending back a contract clearly illustrating that you are giving them PERMISSION to copy, publish, and exploit--but be very clearly that it is permission, and you are not reassigning your IP rights to them. This way, you can still have all of your IP rights to your songs and use them flexibly. Remember: labels exist because of you. If labels die, musicians still exists. If musicians die, labels have nothing to sell but remastered editions of old shit (hint: they die too).

To protect your music from free downloaders and pirates: essentially impossible. If it signed to a label, let the label handle it. Honestly, one of the coolest things I ever saw was one of my songs on the Pirate Bay with ACTUAL seeders. The fact that people would go through the effort to torrent my music was actually flattering.

Once again, pay for an hour of a lawyer's time to look over the contract. Don't just trust this anonymous internet advice.