ASCAP, BMI, and Performance Royalties: A Musician’s Plain-English Guide

You wrote a song, it got some traction, and now it is playing places you have never been — a coffee shop in another state, a late-night radio show, a stranger’s playlist. Somewhere in all of that, your song is earning money. The frustrating question for most creators is simple: where is it, and how do I get it?

The answer runs through three little acronyms that new musicians hear constantly and rarely understand: ASCAP, BMI, and the broader world of performance royalties. Get this right and you unlock a stream of income you are legally owed. Ignore it and that money quietly piles up somewhere with your name nowhere on it. Here is how performance royalties actually work, in plain English.

What a Performance Royalty Actually Is

Copyright law gives the owner of a song a bundle of exclusive rights. One of them is the public performance right — the right to control when your song is played in public. “Publicly” is broader than it sounds. It does not just mean a concert. It means radio and TV broadcasts, a song streaming on Spotify or Apple Music, music playing in a restaurant, bar, gym, or store, a DJ set, a hold-music loop, background music in a YouTube video, and more.

Every one of those public plays is a use of your song, and the law says the people using it owe you for the privilege. That payment is a performance royalty. The catch is obvious: no single songwriter could ever track down every bar, station, and streaming service using their music, invoice each one, and chase the payment. That is exactly the problem performing-rights organizations were built to solve.

Meet the PROs: ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, and GMR

A performing-rights organization (PRO) is a collective that licenses your public performance right on your behalf, collects the money, and pays it out to you. In the United States there are four:

• ASCAP — the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. A not-for-profit owned by its songwriter and publisher members.
• BMI — Broadcast Music, Inc. The largest by number of affiliates, historically not-for-profit and recently restructured as a for-profit company.
• SESAC — a smaller, invitation-only for-profit PRO.
• GMR — Global Music Rights, a boutique invitation-only PRO representing a select roster of major writers.

ASCAP and BMI are the two most creators actually deal with, because both are open to any songwriter and (in ASCAP’s case) free or low-cost to join. Here is the key idea: a PRO sells businesses a blanket license. A radio station or a bar pays one annual fee for the right to play anything in that PRO’s entire catalog, instead of licensing millions of songs one at a time. The PRO pools all that license money and distributes it to members based on how much their songs were played.

Performance Royalties vs. Mechanical Royalties

This is where most new musicians get lost, so slow down here. The same song can earn more than one type of royalty, and they come from different places:

• A performance royalty is paid when your song is played in public — streamed, broadcast, or performed. This is what PROs collect.
• A mechanical royalty is paid when your song is reproduced — a physical copy, a download, or the copy an interactive stream technically makes. In the U.S. this is largely handled by the Mechanical Licensing Collective (the MLC), not by ASCAP or BMI.

So a single Spotify stream can generate both a tiny performance royalty (collected by your PRO) and a tiny mechanical royalty (collected by the MLC). If you only signed up with a PRO, you are collecting one of the two and leaving the other on the table. Getting fully paid means being registered in both systems.

The Two People Inside Every Song: Writer and Publisher

There is one more split that decides how much lands in your account. Every songwriting copyright is divided into two shares:

• The writer’s share — belongs to the person who wrote the song. This part always goes to you as the creator and can never be taken away from the writer.
• The publisher’s share — the business half of the song, traditionally owned by a music publisher who promotes and administers it.

When your PRO pays out a performance royalty, it splits the payment down these two lines. If you have no publisher, the publisher’s share does not vanish — but you have to claim it. Most independent creators set up their own “publishing company” (often just a name and a PRO publisher account) so they collect both the writer’s and the publisher’s share themselves. Skip that step and you may only ever see half of what your songs earn. (This is general information, not legal advice.)

How to Actually Get Paid: The Step-by-Step

Performance royalties do not find you. You have to plug into the system, and it is more paperwork than magic:

1. Join one PRO as a writer. Pick ASCAP or BMI — you can only belong to one at a time as a writer, and switching later is possible but slow. For most people it is close to a coin flip; compare the sign-up cost and payment schedules and choose one.
2. Register a publisher account too. Set up your own publishing entity with the same PRO so you can capture the publisher’s share, not just the writer’s.
3. Register every single song. This is the step people forget. A PRO can only pay you for works it knows you wrote. Log each title, its writers, and the ownership splits. An unregistered song earns nothing, no matter how many times it plays.
4. Report your live performances. Most PROs let you submit setlists from your own gigs, which can trigger royalties for shows you played. It is easy money that goes unclaimed constantly.
5. Keep your details current. Royalties are paid quarterly. Wrong banking or contact info is one of the most common reasons money sits undelivered.

Where the Money Comes From — and the One PRO Money Miss

Your PRO gathers performance royalties from a huge range of sources: terrestrial and satellite radio, broadcast and cable TV, streaming platforms, live venues and concerts, and the endless “general licensing” world of bars, restaurants, gyms, stores, and hotels that pay blanket fees to play music. Individually these are pennies; at scale they add up.

But here is the gap that surprises people. PROs pay the songwriter and publisher for the composition. They do not pay the performing artist or the record label for the sound recording. In the U.S., the performance royalty for the actual recording — earned mainly from digital and satellite radio like SiriusXM and Pandora — is collected by a separate organization called SoundExchange. If you are the recording artist as well as the songwriter, that is a second, entirely separate check you have to register for. Miss it and you are again collecting only part of what you are owed.

The bottom line: a performance royalty is what you are owed every time your song is played in public, and ASCAP, BMI, and the other PROs exist to collect it for you. But the system is opt-in. Join a PRO, register a publisher account, log every song, and remember that mechanical royalties (the MLC) and sound-recording royalties (SoundExchange) are separate pots you also have to claim. The music industry will happily let uncollected money sit forever — the creators who get paid are the ones who take twenty minutes to sign up and then actually register their work.

IPSurge helps creators and small businesses understand and protect their intellectual property — the ideas, names, and work that make them unique. This article is general information, not legal advice; for your specific situation, talk to a music attorney or a royalty administrator.

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Sources & further reading:

• U.S. Copyright Office — Circular 73A: Compulsory License for Making and Distributing Phonorecords
• 17 U.S.C. § 106 — Exclusive rights in copyrighted works (public performance)
• ASCAP — How ASCAP Works / About PROs

Related Reading

• Sync Licensing: How Creators Get Paid When Music Is Used on Video
• Sampling and Remix Rights: Clearing a Track Without Getting Sued
• Cover Songs and Mechanical Licenses: How to Release One Legally