FAQ: Members and voting members

No. You hold the copyright to your music, whether or not you’re our member or a member of any copyright organization. You can operate independently or join another music copyright organization.

As our member, you authorize us to:

• Negotiate licenses for your music usage
• Monitor your copyrights worldwide
• Collect and pay your royalties

This saves considerable time and effort compared to handling everything yourself. Most professional music creators in Finland have chosen us as their partner.

Learn more: Services

You can become a Teosto member if you’re a music creator (composer, lyricist, or arranger) or a music publisher. To qualify for member status:

• You must have at least one published or publicly performed work
• If you’re an arranger, your arrangement must exceed the arrangement threshold and bring new musical elements to the work
• If you’re a publisher, you must be engaged in professional music publishing activities

You can join as either an individual or a company. The heirs of a work’s creator can also become members.

Get started:
Join as a music creator
Join as a publisher

In most cases, yes. We manage your music rights both in Finland and on international platforms. We have existing agreements with both domestic parties and popular streaming services (such as YouTube, Spotify, Instagram, and TikTok).

You can also choose to manage some aspects of your music usage yourself:

• You can decide where your music can be used (for example, live performances or streaming)
• You can select geographical areas where you manage rights yourself

In these cases, you negotiate the terms of use and compensation yourself. Please find more information about self-administration here.

The following use cases are excluded from our membership agreement:

• Game music
• Grand rights (operas, ballets, and musicals)
• Advertisements, trailers, and promos
• Support songs and music idents
• Movies and documentaries in theatrical distribution
• Drama series outside the Nordic countries
• Graphic rights (sheet music and lyrics)

In these cases, you grant permissions and negotiate prices yourself or through your publisher.

Learn more:
Services

You can become a Teosto member here. The process works like this:

1. Complete the membership form online
2. Pay the one-time joining fee upon registration
3. You’ll receive confirmation of your member status and login credentials to our web service via secure email.

If you’re under 18, you’ll also need a guardian’s signature to join.

Learn more:
For new members

You can apply to become a voting member here once you’re already a Teosto member and have collected sufficient copyright royalties to qualify for voting membership. Voting membership is meant for:

• Music creators
• Music publishers
• Professional associations representing music creators or publishers

The Teosto board processes applications and makes membership decisions on an ongoing basis throughout the year.

Anyone who creates music can become a member of Teosto, but voting membership requires established musical activity and a certain level of copyright income. The main difference between regular member status and voting membership comes in decision-making:

• Voting members receive all the same [services] as members
• Voting members also have the right to:
  • Take part in annual meetings
  • Have their say in Teosto’s operational policies
  • Vote in board elections
  • Run for board positions

Becoming a member of Teosto only carries a one-time joining fee:

• Individuals: €100 + VAT (25.5%) = €125.50
• Music publishers: €300 + VAT (25.5%) = €376.50

Individual music creators pay the joining fee online during registration, publishers are sent a separate invoice.

After you become a member, there are no annual fees.

Voting membership itself doesn’t cost anything, but you can only apply for voting membership once you’re a Teosto member and have accumulated enough copyright royalties to qualify for voting membership.

No. The joining fee is the only payment you’ll make to Teosto as a music creator.

See instructions here.

Register your work in the online service whenever you complete a new piece – without this, we cannot pay you royalties for your music performances.

Learn more: Registering your work

If you perform yourself, submit a performance report in the online service as soon as possible after the performance.

Learn more: Web service instructions

You can easily update your information in our web service. See instructions here.

You can terminate your Teosto membership agreement:

• Partially: you can select specific music usage types or countries where you want to manage your rights yourself. For example:
  • You can handle live performance licenses and royalties yourself while leaving radio plays and streaming services to us
  • You can decide to handle all your music licenses and royalties in e.g. Germany yourself while letting us manage them in other countries
  • See instructions for withdrawing rights categories or geographical areas here
• Completely: by terminating the entire member agreement, see instructions here.

Artificial intelligence can support human creativity and enhance production processes. However, AI cannot replace human creativity: under copyright law, only the result of a human’s creative work can be protected by copyright. 

Therefore: 

• If you use AI solely as a technical tool to support your own creative process, you can register the work with Teosto as usual. In this case, you are responsible for ensuring that you have made a sufficient number of independent creative choices for the work to meet the threshold of originality. 

• If you have created either the composition or the lyrics yourself, and the other part (composition/lyrics) is entirely generated by AI, you may register the work with Teosto partially. You can only register the part of the work that is the result of your own creative effort. 

• A work entirely generated by AI cannot be registered in Teosto’s work database and is not eligible for copyright protection. 

You can find more information about registering works created with the help of AI on our website. 

When using AI, we also recommend paying close attention to the terms of use of the AI services. Some AI platforms reserve rights to the outputs they generate in their terms of use. This means that even if you have modified the AI-generated output, you may not have the rights to the final result, and therefore cannot register it with Teosto.

A pseudonym is a stage name or pen name that a music composer, lyricist or arranger may choose to use as their author name when registering a work. The pseudonym should be as personal and distinctive as possible to avoid confusion between different people.

If you wish to use a pseudonym in your work registrations, you must notify Teosto of this so that we can register it in your information. If the pseudonym is not registered, we will not be able to allocate and distribute the royalties collected for the use of the work to the right people. 

A pseudonym can be public, “Teosto public” or secret. If a pseudonym is public, the real name of the author behind the pseudonym is also public information. In the case of a Teosto public pseudonym, other Teosto music author members can see the real name of the author behind the pseudonym. In the case of a secret pseudonym, no information about the author behind the pseudonym will be disclosed to anyone by Teosto.

Notify Teosto of a pseudonym