M3 StudiosSpring, TX5 min readJuly 10, 2026Trademarking your artist name at the USPTO costs $350 per class of goods or services in 2026, and it is the registration that protects the name itself. Copyright covers your songs. The trademark covers the brand you perform, release, and sell merchandise under, and until you build trademark rights in it, another act can take that name national before you do.
Houston artists spend years building a name across releases, shows, and content, then discover the name was the one asset they never secured. The federal system is built for exactly this situation, and the USPTO publishes musician-specific guidance that answers most of the hard questions. What follows is the money, the classes, the refusals that blindside artists, and the ownership question every group should settle before the first dollar arrives.
Copyright and trademark divide the job cleanly. Copyright protects creative works: the songs, the recordings, the videos. Registering those is its own process with its own fees, covered in our guide to how to copyright a song in 2026. A trademark protects a source identifier: the name, logo, or slogan that tells the public who a product or performance comes from. Your catalog can be fully copyrighted while your name sits unprotected, and in that gap another artist can register first.
Trademark rights in the U.S. begin with use. Performing, releasing, and selling under a name builds common-law rights in the geography where you actually operate. Federal registration is voluntary, and the USPTO's own musician guidance says why it is worth the fee: registration gives nationwide priority, a legal presumption of ownership, the right to use the ® symbol, and a public record that blocks confusingly similar filings behind you. Common-law rights might protect a name in Houston. Registration protects it in all fifty states while your audience is still growing into them.
The USPTO moved to a single base application fee in January 2025, and the current schedule is straightforward. The base fee is $350 per class of goods or services. Surcharges apply to sloppy filings: $100 per class if required information is missing, and $200 per class if you write your own free-form description of goods, plus another $200 for each additional 1,000 characters of custom text. Selecting preapproved descriptions from the Trademark ID Manual costs nothing extra, so the cheapest application is a complete one built entirely from the Manual.
Filing on intent to use, before the name is in commerce, adds real money later: $150 per class to file the statement of use once you launch, and $125 per class for each six-month extension you need. Registration also has a maintenance clock. Between the fifth and sixth year you must file a declaration of continued use at $325 per class, and at year ten a combined renewal at $650 per class, then every ten years after. Miss those windows and the registration dies. A grace period exists, at $100 more per class.
Trademark applications are organized by international classes, and you pay per class. The USPTO's guidance for performers lists the exact identifications musicians file most, and they cluster in three classes. Class 9 covers the recordings themselves: musical sound recordings, downloadable audio files, music videos. Class 41 covers entertainment services: live musical performances, concerts, personal appearances, and providing music online. Class 25 covers the merchandise engine: t-shirts, hats, and the rest of the apparel table. Posters and stickers sit in Class 16.
Full coverage across recordings, shows, and merch at $350 each runs $1,050 in base fees. An artist on a budget should know the strategic order, and it comes straight from the fine print of USPTO practice: Class 41 is the working musician's anchor class. Registering a stage name for recordings in Class 9 requires evidence that the name has been used on a series of creative works, at least two releases with different content, plus proof the name functions as a source identifier. Registering the same name for live performances in Class 41 requires no series evidence at all. For a newer artist with one release, the performance class is the door that is already open.
"Who is responsible for protecting my trademark rights? You are," the USPTO's guidance for musicians states. The owner of a registration is responsible for taking legal action to enforce it.
Three examiner refusals hit musicians more than anyone else, and all three are avoidable.
First, the single creative work refusal. The title of one song or one album is unregistrable as a trademark. Titles identify a work, and a trademark must identify a source across a series of works. An artist name earns registration for recordings once it appears across multiple releases with different content. Building the catalog first is part of building the claim.
Second, the ornamentation refusal, and this one costs merch-heavy artists real filings. A name printed large across the front of a t-shirt reads to the USPTO as decoration, and a decorative specimen gets refused. The specimen that works is the name used the way clothing brands use it: on the neck tag, the label, the hang tag, or backed by evidence the name is already a recognized source from your music. Photograph the tag, keep the big front print for style.
Third, the living-individual consent requirement. A trademark that names a real living person, including a stage name that identifies you, must include that person's signed written consent in the file. Solo artists consent to their own name. A band registering a name that reads like a person's name files a statement that it identifies nobody living.
The application forces a question many groups have never answered out loud: who owns this name? The USPTO accepts four structures. An individual owner files in their own name. Joint owners, a band with no formal entity, list every member as a co-owner. A formal partnership files under the partnership. A corporation or LLC files under the entity, which is the cleanest answer for a group, because the entity survives lineup changes. When members leave and are replaced, ownership documentation must be recorded with the USPTO, and bands that never formed an entity discover the name is jointly owned by whoever was in the room at filing time. The entity decision connects directly to the liability and structure choices covered in LLC for musicians and creators in Texas, and the ownership logic mirrors what a split sheet does for a song, mapped in split sheets in 2026.
Two symbols mark the two stages of the claim, and using them correctly costs nothing. Any artist using a name in commerce can put the TM symbol beside it right now, registered or otherwise, as public notice of a trademark claim. The ® symbol is reserved for federally registered marks, and using it before registration issues can itself become grounds for refusal. The practical move for a working Houston artist is simple: mark the name TM on the merch tags, the channel art, and the release pages the day you commit to it, because the symbol plus consistent use is what builds the common-law record an examiner and a courtroom will later look at. Keep dated evidence as you go. Screenshots of releases, show flyers, sales pages, and press with dates attached become the proof of first use that decides priority disputes, and priority, who used the name first in commerce, is the whole game when two acts collide over one name.
The process rewards preparation over speed. Search first, at the USPTO's public trademark database, for your exact name and anything confusingly similar in your classes, because likelihood of confusion with an earlier mark is the most common substantive refusal and the fee is gone either way. Search the working name before you print merch, before you press vinyl, before the release under it, because renaming after a refusal costs far more than the search. Then decide your classes deliberately, build every description from the ID Manual, gather clean specimens, settle ownership, and file through the USPTO's Trademark Center. Applications wait months for examination, and industry guides consistently put the full timeline around eight to ten months at the fastest. An examiner's office action gets a response window; silence abandons the application, and revival costs $250.
The name is the asset that touches everything else you build: the releases feeding your publishing and royalty stack, the shows, the channel, the merchandise line. Houston's creator economy keeps producing artists whose brand outgrows their paperwork, and the artists who win that moment are the ones whose name was already theirs on paper. The full business-side playbook for that climb lives in our creator income playbook for Houston.
The USPTO base fee is $350 per class. Most musicians consider Class 9 (recordings), Class 41 (live performances), and Class 25 (merchandise), so full coverage runs $1,050 in base fees, plus surcharges for incomplete or custom-written applications and later maintenance fees of $325 and $650 per class.
No, a single creative work's title is unregistrable. A name becomes registrable for recordings once it identifies a series of works, at least two releases with different content, with evidence the public connects the name to the source.
No. Individuals and unincorporated groups can file and own trademarks. Groups benefit from an entity because it holds the name through lineup changes, and ownership transfers must be recorded with the USPTO.
Class 41, entertainment services in the nature of live musical performances, requires no series-of-works evidence for a stage name, which makes it the practical first filing for artists early in their catalog. Class 9 and Class 25 follow as releases and merchandise scale.
Ownership follows the structure on file. Jointly owned marks stay with the listed individuals until an assignment is recorded. Names held by a partnership, corporation, or LLC stay with the entity, which is why formed bands typically register through one.
Follow M3News for the Houston creative economy: Instagram @metamusicmedia.x, TikTok @metamusicmedia, YouTube @metamusicmedia, or write to info@metamusicmedia.com. The business side of a music career, from name to publishing to income streams, is the territory M3 Studios' guides map in plain language at creator education.
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