How to Find Out the Year a Song was Written

If you want to see if a song is in public domain, or if you just want to see when a favorite song of your was written, you can do a little digging to find out the year. Since songs are copyright protected by the songwriters, it is easy to find out the year a song was written because that will be the year of the copyright. You do not need any special music industry contacts because you can find out when a song was written on your own.

While you may have seen some books in your local bookstore that feature the top hits, such as a Billboard Top 40 Hits type of book, this type of book cannot help you. Books like this typically list only the hit songs. And the list does not have details on the year that the song was written, just the year that it became a hit on the song charts. A lot of times you cannot even find out the names of the songwriters from these types of books.

Check in the booklet for the CD if you have the CD that the song is on. While not all CD booklets have this information, if there are song lyrics in the booklet you can usually find the year the song was written. The year will be listed with the songwriter names.

Visit the websites of each of the performing rights organizations, which are ASCAP, BMI and SESAC. These organizations have databases of all songs that are written by their affiliated writers. Since the organizations are responsible for tracking song plays for royalty payments, songwriters affiliate with one or more of the organizations. Even if the songs are never recorded by a singer or band, the performing rights organization will still have info on when it was written in their database.

Search the song database on each site for the song. You can search by song title, songwriter or the singer or band that performed the song. Songs are not in all of the databases, so you will need to move from each one until you find the song you are looking for. Click on the song title when you find it.

Look for the publisher information on the song. When you see it, click on it to reveal the contact details for the song publisher. Use that information to contact the publisher to ask about the year that the song was written.