Our NYC Estate Planning Lawyers Can Help Musicians Handle Their Estate Planning Needs
Few musicians have the right combination of luck and talent needed to transform their passion into a profession. If you’ve made music that’s protected by copyright, provides royalties, or you otherwise expect to outlive yourself, you can’t afford to take chances with your creative legacy. 
The Landskind & Ricaforte Law Group, P.C. is committed to helping artists and performers find creative solutions for complex estate planning problems. Here, our top-notch estate planning lawyers discuss music laws and how they might impact your estate.
Why You Need a Comprehensive Estate Plan
A comprehensive estate plan isn’t just for the rich or for those who need a trust. It’s a group of legal documents that manage assets for any person after their death. Everyone has the right to decide how their assets will be distributed, and an estate plan helps ensure their wishes are honored, and their loved ones, friends, and beneficiaries are provided for.
Your estate plan, whether it consists of a simple will or incorporates a trust and other asset-protection tools, is a legally binding record of your wishes. In creating an estate plan, you get to make decisions about many things, including the following:
- Who your heirs will be
- Who receives your assets and how they’re distributed after your death
- What you want to happen if you are ever incapacitated or placed on life support
Your will, for instance, isn’t just a document for naming heirs; rather, it can also be used to name an executor and appoint a guardian for your minor child. Trusts, on the other hand, let you set conditions for each of your beneficiaries’ inheritances, minimizing the potential for conflict and ensuring that financially irresponsible family members don’t receive resources that exceed their sense of personal responsibility.
Your estate plan can be as complex, as intricate, or as simple as you need it to be—but you do need to have one. Without a plan, you forfeit the right to decide what happens to your assets, leaving a court to decide which of your loved ones deserves an inheritance. Having an estate plan is particularly important for New York City musicians because music laws can create significant complications. Musicians, more than most, often have considerations that go beyond the distribution of financial accounts and physical possessions. They must consider the impact of copyrights and determine who will receive their estate’s share of royalties.
Creative Careers, Copyright, and Your Estate: What New York Musicians Need to Know
New York City is home to tens of thousands of musicians, some just beginning their careers and others already at the peak of professional success. No matter what heights they’ve reached or how high their aspirations go, they can’t forget to account for their creative rights.
An Overview of Copyright
If you’ve ever written a song or recorded a track, you hold its copyright until you authorize another person or party to take ownership. Copyright holders have many entitlements, including the following:
- The right to reproduce copies of an original work
- The right to permit derivations of their original work
- The right to control distribution through licensing, sales, and other agreements
- The right to publicly perform copyrighted works and to permit others to perform in your place
Your copyright exists from the moment a work is written, recorded, or fixed in any medium. However, only you and your estate retain the right to push back against infringement if your copyrights have been registered with the U.S. Copyright Office.
The Difference Between Musical Rights and Performance Rights
Copyright is an issue that can complicate the estate plan of any creative professional, whether they make music, write books, or paint portraits. But copyright in the music industry can be comparatively complex, especially when more than one person contributes to a composition.
Musical copyrights typically fall into either of these basic categories:
- Mechanical rights, which are paid to songwriters and performers when music is sold or streamed.
- Performance rights, which are paid whenever music is performed publicly—on stage, through Spotify, at a bar, or in a restaurant.
If a copyrighted work generates profit or is distributed for commercial use, its holder will typically receive royalties in accordance with what rights they hold to the work.
How Your Estate Plan Affects Your Copyrights
Copyrighted works and any related royalties often outlive their creators. In general:
- Any work created on or after January 1, 1978 provides copyright protection that lasts for your lifetime plus an additional 70 years.
- Any work that you created in collaboration with another person or party provides copyright protection for the duration of the last surviving author’s lifetime plus an additional 70 years.
- Any work performed for or commissioned by an employer may grant the employer copyright. The individual artist cannot pass this copyright to their heirs, but the copyright holder can.
New York law allows copyright holders and their heirs to recapture certain rights, but doing so often entails conflict with whichever entity currently holds the copyright. An estate plan could help you not only anticipate copyright-related conflicts but ensure that your heirs are afforded the same rights and protections you have as an original artist or copyright-holder.
How Landskind & Ricaforte Law Group, P.C. Could Help Protect Your Musical Success
Every estate has the potential to face unexpected complications if it isn’t protected by a plan that anticipates the challenges inherent to succession. For musicians, these challenges can pose a significant threat to the inheritances of their loved ones—a threat that can take the form of compromised copyrights, severely reduced royalties, or unexpected threats to a musician’s creative legacy.
The Landskind & Ricaforte Law Group, P.C. has spent years helping musicians, artists, and other creative professionals account for contingencies and protect their legacies from the unexpected.
Our experienced team of Brooklyn estate planning lawyers could help you explore the utility of the following:
- Wills and testaments. Everybody needs a will, and successful musicians are no different. Writing a will is not only the best protection against intestacy, but it’s also a means to nominate a guardian for your children and make informed decisions about your end-of-life care.
- Trusts. Trusts are legal arrangements defined by fiduciary duty or an agreement to protect and preserve trust assets for the sole benefit of your heirs. A trust can be used to shield your home from probate or to oversee the management of your copyrights long after you have died.
- Power of attorney. A power of attorney is a trusted person you allow to make decisions on your behalf. This person will speak for you and follow through on your wishes should you become incapacitated.
- Intellectual property protections. Even professionals can’t always grapple with the complexity of copyright rules and regulations. However, the complexity of copyright law is a good reason to take action early, before life’s many uncertainties can get in the way.