Song Title Generator

Nobody owns a song title

This surprises people, and it is worth stating plainly, because it changes what a title is for.

Copyright protects original expression. It does not protect names, titles, short phrases or slogans. The US Copyright Office says so in a circular whose entire subject is works that copyright does not touch, and titles are on the list.

So a song title cannot be owned. That is why hundreds of different songs carry the same title, and why two of them can chart in the same decade. Reusing a title is generally fine, though a name closely tied to one famous release can still carry trademark or branding considerations, so it is worth a quick check before you build something commercial around it.

The song itself is a different matter. The melody and the words are protected the moment they exist in fixed form. The recording is protected separately from the composition. All of that is real. The title is not.

Which means the title has no legal work to do at all. Its only job is to be remembered and to be found, and that is a much more interesting problem than ownership. None of this is legal advice, and if you are about to release something, ask somebody qualified.

The title is the hook, until it isn't

The default rule of popular songwriting is not complicated. The title is the line you repeat. It arrives in the chorus, it lands on the strongest beat, and by the third chorus the listener could not forget it if they tried.

There is a practical reason. Somebody has to be able to find the song. A listener hears it once, retains one phrase, and searches for that phrase. If the phrase you repeated is not the title, they will not find you.

Then there are the songs that break the rule, and they break it deliberately.

Plenty of famous songs never say their own titles. Not once. The title sits outside the song like a caption on a photograph, telling you how to look at what you are hearing, and it is doing something no lyric can do, which is comment on the lyric.

That is a real technique, and it is expensive. You spend the listener's ability to find you in exchange for a frame around the song. Do it when the frame is worth more than the search.

Every song is addressed to somebody

Read these titles and count the people. She Hates She's Been Played. He's Bad For You. I Love I Won't Stop.

Pronouns everywhere. This is not an accident of the list, it is what popular song is.

A novel can describe a world. A song has three minutes and one voice, so almost every one of them collapses into a relationship between an I and a you, occasionally observed by a he or a she. The title is where that relationship gets announced.

And the pronoun decides the whole posture of the song before a note is played.

I is confession. The singer is exposed and the listener is a witness.

You is accusation or seduction, and it is the most powerful, because the listener cannot help but be the you.

She and he are gossip. The singer and the listener are together, on the outside, looking at somebody else.

Change the pronoun in a title and you have changed who the audience is standing next to. That is the single most useful thing on this page.

The shapes a title comes in

The possessive phrase. Player Of Gold. Jungle Of Dreams. Two nouns and a preposition, one of them concrete and one abstract. It sounds like a metaphor even when it is not, and the listener finishes it for you.

The full sentence. She Heard He's Guilty. A complete thought, with a verb. It reads as a headline, and it makes the song sound like it is about to tell you a story.

The fragment. Trapped By Rhythm. No subject. Something has happened to somebody and we are dropped in after the fact.

The single word. The hardest, because a single word has to be strange or perfect. Ordinary words vanish into the language.

Notice that the sentence titles are almost always in the present tense. Songs happen now. A title in the past tense is describing something finished, and finished things do not need three minutes and a chorus.

Writing one that survives the song

Say it, do not read it. The title is going to be spoken by a stranger recommending your song to another stranger. If it needs punctuation to make sense, it will not survive the journey.

Put an image in it. Concrete nouns are remembered. Abstract nouns are agreed with and forgotten. Gold and jungle stay. Love and pain slide off.

Do not put the whole idea in. A title that explains the song leaves the listener nothing to discover. A title that raises a question buys three minutes of attention.

Search it before you commit. You cannot own it, and you cannot stop somebody else using it. But if a very famous song already has that title, your version will spend its life at the bottom of every result.

Then sing it. If the title will not sit comfortably on the strongest beat of the chorus, it is not the title yet.

A note on the titles above

The titles come from a list our team researched and checked by hand, and one is drawn at random each time. It runs on your own device, and nothing you type is sent anywhere.

Questions people ask about song titles

Can two songs have the same title?

Yes, and thousands do. Copyright does not protect titles, names or short phrases, so nobody has an exclusive claim to a title. The song itself is protected. The words on the label are not.

Does the title have to appear in the lyrics?

No, though it usually does, because listeners search for the line they remember. Songs whose titles never appear are using the title as a comment on the song rather than a part of it. It is a real technique and it costs you findability.

How long should a title be?

Short enough to sit on one strong beat of the chorus. Most of the titles that stick are two to four words, and the ones that are longer usually have a natural stress that carries them.

What if a famous song already has my title?

Legally you are free. Practically you are competing for every search result with a song that everybody already knows, and you will lose. Change one word.

Why do so many song titles have I, you, she or he in them?

Because a song is one voice speaking to somebody. The pronoun tells the listener where they are standing. I makes them a witness, you makes them the target, and she or he makes them a confidant.

References

1. Works Not Protected by Copyright, Circular 33. U.S. Copyright Office. https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ33.pdf
2. What Does Copyright Protect? U.S. Copyright Office. https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html