a. Copyrighted
b. Public domain

Naturally, if you use music or songs that belongs to the public domain then you will not need to get permission. However things are very different if the music is copyrighted. This is where confusing things starts to crawl your mind. Some follow up questions:

a. Who is the main in-charge of copyrighted music?

Answer: You need to know the music publisher of that song. Music publisher administers copyrighted work that includes the songs/music. This is the person you need to obtain permission to use their music.In most cases, this is not available so you need to look who is the artist or the songwriter of the song. You will know the artist or songwriter in the song credits found in your iPod or the clip information found in your MP3. Try contacting the artist or the songwriter and ask who is the publisher of their song. Sometimes the artist is also both the songwriter and the publisher but this is not true in all cases. It is not safe to assume that the music is free or in public domain, you need to research/dig further because many of these assumptions ended in the court of law.

When you contact the publisher, there is where you inform them that you are going to use a song. A lot of users does not go with this procedure, it is why you can see a lot of infringers out there. A good example is they use a copyrighted song in a movie clip background uploaded to YouTube without obtaining any permission, as a result YouTube disables the audio. You can see, that this happens a lot. Simple rule, a music publisher represents the songwriter and is now the in-charge of the copyrighted songs/music, it is why you need to obtain permission from them.

Another good clue to find out is to know where you download or get the song. If it is coming from a website, try to check what are the terms and conditions attached. Does it include information about the publisher? A good way is to contact the website owner representing the songs. Most of the time, website owner is not the music publisher but they know whom to contact if you are interested to use the songs. Fore example, this domain: www.musicforlicense.net is a music publishers website, so you can obtain permission directly from us since we are also the song publishers of the music featured in this website.

b. If it seems unclear who is the music publisher behind the songs/music then how could you obtain further information?

You can go to each these websites:

www.ascap.com/ -Performance right societies
www.bmi.com/- Performance right societies
www.sesac.com/- Performance right societies
www.harryfox.com/ – Mechanical right societies

What you will do is to use their website search function (it may differ from site to site), and try inputting as much information as you have. This might be the song title, artist, etc. Your objective is to know the music publisher of the song. Bear in mind that 3 of the 4 websites above are performing right societies and they represent the music publishers also. So if you are going to obtain permission to use copyrighted music to be used for public performance (e.g play the song in your restaurant, company, radio , pod cast..everything that involves public performance of the song) you only need to contact the ASCAP, BMI or SESAC not directly the music publisher. This speeds up your search and saves time.