What a PRO pays for, and what it doesn’t

51 · 2026-09-19 · 18 min read · Español

A performing rights organisation licenses the public performance of musical works and pays the money to the writers and publishers registered with it. That is the whole job: one right, one copyright, two shares. It pays nothing for the recording, nothing to a performer for performing, and nothing on a mechanical, a sync fee or a work it holds no registration for. This page is what a PRO pays for, the shape the payment takes, and the list of money that never comes through this door — with the piece that owns each thing it hands off.

A PRO — ASCAP, BMI, SESAC or GMR in the United States, SOCAN in Canada — licenses the public performance of musical works and pays the writers and publishers registered with it. BMI says its royalties “are performing right royalties, which are earned when a musical work is performed publicly.”
A PRO pays on the song, never on the recording. In the United States the rights in a sound recording “do not include any right of performance under section 106(4),” and a performer who wrote none of the song is paid nothing by any PRO.
The payment is two shares. BMI treats the writer and the publisher as one unit worth 200 per cent, half each, and a writer who has assigned no performing rights to a publisher receives the entire 200 per cent.
Not every play pays, and not every play pays the same. BMI pays a radio feature performance of 60 seconds or more and pays nothing for background music on radio; a live show pays only when the writer reports it.
A PRO does not collect mechanical royalties, recording royalties, a sync fee or grand rights, and cannot pay on a work it holds no registration for or to a writer who belongs to no society.

What does a PRO actually pay you for?

A PRO pays you for public performances of a musical work you wrote or publish: radio, television, venues, live shows and streams it has licensed.

The right is one clause of statute. Section 106 of the US Copyright Act gives the owner of a musical work the exclusive right “to perform the copyrighted work publicly,” and section 101 spells out both words. To perform is “to recite, render, play, dance, or act it, either directly or by means of any device or process.” Publicly, in its first half, is “a place open to the public or at any place where a substantial number of persons outside of a normal circle of a family and its social acquaintances is gathered” — a bar, a gym, a hall with two hundred people in it — and, in its second half, anything transmitted to the public, which the map of every stream quotes because a broadcast and a stream are both inside it. Canada says the same in fewer words: copyright under section 3(1) includes the sole right “to perform the work or any substantial part thereof in public” and, at paragraph (f), “to communicate the work to the public by telecommunication.”

Who pays in. BMI’s licensing page states the obligation from the other side of the counter — “federal copyright law requires businesses to get permission from copyright owners before publicly performing their works” — and lists restaurants, bars, hotels, fitness clubs, retail stores, websites and radio and television broadcasters as the businesses it means. SOCAN: “We issue licenses for the public playing, performance, communication, and reproduction of music.” The licence fee is what becomes the royalty; BMI says its payments “are based upon the license fees that BMI collects from each individual station that performed a work.”

And what the royalty is, in the society’s own one sentence. BMI’s FAQ: “BMI royalties are performing right royalties, which are earned when a musical work is performed publicly.” One right, one copyright, licensed wholesale and paid out retail. Everything a PRO does is inside that sentence, and everything it refuses is outside it.

Which copyright is a PRO paying on — the song or the recording?

The song only: a PRO pays the writers and publishers of the musical work; the recording’s owner and performers are paid, if at all, elsewhere.

The statute closes the door in one sentence. Section 114(a): “The exclusive rights of the owner of copyright in a sound recording are limited to the rights specified by clauses (1), (2), (3) and (6) of section 106, and do not include any right of performance under section 106(4).” No general performance right in the recording means no performance royalty on it, which is why United States radio pays the song and pays the record nothing — the map states that plainly, and this page only uses it. Clause (6), the one right the recording does get, is performance “by means of a digital audio transmission,” and it belongs to a different building: SoundExchange describes itself as “the sole organization designated by the U.S. government to administer the Section 114 sound recording license,” paying copyright owners and performers, and no PRO touches it.

Canada gives the recording more and gives none of it to SOCAN. Under section 19(1) of the Copyright Act the performer and maker of a published sound recording are entitled “to be paid equitable remuneration for its performance in public or its communication to the public by telecommunication,” and subsection (2) says who is paid — “the collective society authorized under Part VII.1 to collect them.” That society is Re:Sound, in its own words the Canadian not-for-profit licensing company for the performance rights of artists and record companies. A performance right, and still not SOCAN’s.

Two consequences you can check against your own catalogue tonight. If you sang it and did not write it, no PRO owes you anything for it, in either country, on any play. If you wrote it and somebody else sang it, the PRO pays you and not them. What a performer is owed instead, and by whom, is the featured-credit piece’s; what owning the master entitles you to is its own page. The venue’s licence fee paid the people who wrote your set. As far as that cheque is concerned, you were the furniture.

Who gets the money — the writer, the publisher, or both?

Both: a PRO pays a writer share to the writer and a publisher share to the publisher, and at BMI an unpublished writer receives both.

BMI’s royalty policy manual sets the arithmetic out as a single unit: “BMI considers payments to songwriters or composers and to publishers as a single unit equal to 200%.” Where there is the usual division, “the total writers’ shares will be 100% (half of the available 200%), and the total publishers’ shares will be the remaining 100%,” and “The total publishers’ shares may not exceed 100%.” Two cheques for one performance, each addressed to a different party, and neither one able to swallow the other.

Then the sentence this section exists for, verbatim, because it answers the question most self-releasing writers have never asked out loud: “Where no performing rights (or only partial performing rights) have been assigned to a publisher, the songwriters or composers will receive the entire 200% (or the balance of the entire 200%) in the same ratio as their respective writer shares.” The publisher share is not a share that exists only when a publisher does. It is half the payment, addressed to whoever holds the publishing rights, and when nobody does, BMI addresses it to you. What each of those two shares is, and what question each one answers, is the master-versus-publishing piece’s; the writer share’s size is decided on a split sheet, and a PRO pays what the registration says.

SOCAN states its side of the same thing as an instruction: its FAQ says “Tell us how you want the royalties allocated, and we’ll make sure the royalties are sent in the percentages you’ve agreed to.” ASCAP’s rule is not on this page, because ASCAP’s help pages refuse to be read by anything that is not a browser, and this site does not quote what it could not open. And the contrast worth holding onto: The MLC says it “does not pay separate shares to writers and publishers” — one party, one share, one payment — so the two-cheque shape is the PRO’s and nobody else’s. What a publishing administrator’s percentage buys against that rule is a piece not yet written.

Which plays pay, and how much does a play have to be?

Only performances the PRO has licensed and can identify, and BMI pays nothing for background music or partial plays on radio.

BMI publishes the threshold. “BMI considers a radio feature performance of a popular song to be one that lasts 60 seconds or more and is the sole sound broadcast at the time of the performance.” And it publishes the floor beneath it, in full:

No payment is currently made for the following types of performances in electronic media: Cue, bridge or background music on radio; Partial performances of popular songs on radio; Station IDs or public service announcements in any medium; Promotional announcements on radio or on local broadcast, cable or satellite TV, except as otherwise indicated.

Fifty-nine seconds of your chorus under the traffic report is, as far as the royalty is concerned, traffic.

Television pays by kind. A feature performance is “the focus of audience attention at the time of the broadcast”; background is “dramatic underscore to a scene where the music is audible but not the focus of audience attention”; a theme is “regularly associated with a television program and identifies that program to the viewer.” Which of the three your song was is decided by a document you have probably never seen. BMI on cue sheets: “An accurately filled out cue sheet is a log of all the music used in a production,” and cue sheets are “the primary means by which performing rights organizations track the use of music in films and TV.” The production company files it. BMI’s own advice is that composers prepare their own “for comparison purposes or ask to see those filled out by the production company before it is submitted.”

Streams pay, on the song’s performance half, at a rate nobody prints. BMI says every work performed on a digital music service “will be eligible for a Current Activity Payment,” and that it “calculates a unique royalty rate for each work, which is based upon the license fees collected from the service that performed the work in combination with the number of times each work streamed on the service.” So there is no per-stream price on the song side either — the statement piece says it for the recording side, and the line holds across. The other half of the stream, the mechanical, is The MLC’s, and the PRO never sees it.

Live shows pay from a list. BMI says it “uses an independent source of live pop concert information to identify and create a database of the top 300 concert tours and/or concert events/festivals each quarter.” A show outside that list exists to the society only if the writer says so, which is the next section.

Does playing your own songs live pay anything?

Yes, if the venue is licensed and you report the show: BMI Live takes a performing songwriter’s set lists, SOCAN a notification within a year.

BMI Live “allows performing songwriters to input up to six months of their performance data to be considered for payment,” reaching back nine months from the submission. The rules are exact and every one of them costs somebody a cheque. “Publishers cannot submit setlists on behalf of their songwriters. Only performing songwriters may submit setlists to BMI Live.” Each member of a band has to be a BMI member to be paid. Direct deposit is required. Domestic United States performances only, submitted by four quarterly deadlines, paid quarterly. And a show has to be a public performance under a licence BMI holds, which rules out its published list: digital livestreams, weddings, educational settings, cruise ships, religious services, classical concerts, radio and television broadcasts, amusement parks and street performances, among others.

SOCAN’s route is a Notification of Live Performance, with proof of the show, filed within a year — the map piece has it, and this page does not restate it.

Hold the shape of that. The venue’s licence fee is already paid; the society already has the money; the only thing between it and you is a list of what was played, and nobody but the writer is allowed to send it. Report a night of covers to BMI Live and every dollar of it goes to the people who wrote the covers. That is not a loophole. That is the section before this one, with a receipt.

What does a PRO never pay?

A PRO never pays mechanical royalties, recording royalties, the sync fee or grand rights, nor anything on an unregistered work or to a non-member writer.

Mechanical royalties. BMI’s FAQ: “Mechanical royalties and synchronization fees are paid by record companies and film and TV producers directly to the copyright owner, usually the publisher, or his or her representative.” Its digital licence says the same from the licensee’s side — it “does not include reproduction, distribution, or other intellectual property rights in musical works or sound recordings.” In the United States the mechanical on streams and downloads is The MLC’s, which draws the line from its side too: membership there “does not replace other memberships,” and the PROs are the first names on its list. Canada’s two doors are on the map.
Recording royalties. The distributor’s statement carries the stores’ money for the master and nothing else — six causes, most of them not errors — and the recording’s public performance, where a country pays it, is SoundExchange’s and Re:Sound’s, above.
The sync fee. Negotiated with the owner of each copyright, or it does not exist; the map argues why. But the broadcast of a placement is a public performance of the song, and the PRO pays that — off the cue sheet, at the television rates in the previous section. The fee and the performance are two payments, and only the second comes through this door.
Grand rights. SOCAN: “SOCAN represents the ‘small’ performing rights in songs and compositions. When they’re used in theatrical shows and/or operas that combine the music with staging, dialogue, and costuming, it’s referred to as a ‘grand’ right.” A musical built on your songs is licensed by you, not by your society.
A work nobody registered. BMI: “If you expect to receive performance royalties, all you have to do is make sure your work is registered with BMI.” The society pays the list it has.
A writer who never joined. SOCAN, on a co-writer who is not a member: “Your co-writer will, unfortunately, not collect until they join SOCAN or an affiliated international performing rights society.” Your half can be registered, matched and paying while the other half belongs to nobody the society can find.

Foreign plays are not on that list, and the FAQ says why. What is on it is the money people mean when they say the industry took it. Nobody took it. Nobody registered you either, and until somebody does you are shit out of luck, in writing.

What does a PRO need from you before it pays?

A PRO needs a membership, a registration of each work with every writer’s share and publisher, and a report of each show or screen use.

The membership is yours to take out; nothing a distributor does takes it out for you. The registration is per work, and BMI says what it has to carry: “the work should be registered with BMI indicating the percentages allocable to all songwriters or composers and all publishers so that the total is not more than 200%.” Every co-writer registers in a society of their own, or their share sits — SOCAN’s sentence above. The percentages come off the split sheet, and the names on it come from a question with a real answer, not from who was in the room. The society files each of you under an IPI number, which has its own piece coming.

The report is whatever the society cannot see for itself: a set list for a show, a cue sheet for a screen use — and BMI’s advice on the cue sheet is to ask to see it before it goes in.

That is the whole list: a membership, a registration per work, a report per performance the society cannot see. Each is a form. Hercules got twelve labours and not one of them was a form.

This week, in order:

Join, in your own name. A PRO pays its members and nobody else, and a distributor account is not a membership.
Register every released work, every writer on it, every publisher, with the shares off the sheet — and check that each co-writer is in a society somewhere.
Report the shows. BMI Live takes up to six months of set lists at a time and reaches nine months back; SOCAN takes a year. Every show older than that is gone.
Ask for the cue sheet on every placement you have ever had, and compare it with what was actually used.

Then run the catalogue behind this release through the audit’s registers layer, because a work missing from one society is rarely the only thing missing.

FAQ

I recorded a cover — does my PRO pay me for it?

No. A PRO pays the song’s writers and publishers on every performance of your cover, and pays the performer nothing. The recording’s money reaches you through your distributor and, on noninteractive digital services, through SoundExchange in the United States or Re:Sound in Canada. Where each of those streams is collected is the map piece’s subject.

Does a PRO pay me when my song is in a film or an advertisement?

Not the sync fee: BMI says synchronization fees are paid by film and TV producers directly to the copyright owner, and no society collects them. Every broadcast of the placement is a public performance of the song, though, and a PRO pays that from the production’s cue sheet. Two payments, two doors, and only the second one is the PRO’s.

Do I need to join a PRO in every country my music plays in?

No. One society collects the world through its peers: BMI says its reciprocal agreements with copyright societies in other countries allow it to collect royalties for foreign performances, with most foreign royalties distributed within one and two years, and SOCAN says revenues are received from its international peers for the use of its members’ works around the world.

Does a PRO pay for a livestream or a wedding gig?

Not through BMI Live, whose list of ineligible performances names digital livestreams, weddings, religious services, cruise ships, educational settings and street performances among others. A performance that falls outside the licences a PRO holds is not one it pays on, however many people heard it.

Sources

US Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 106 — the exclusive right in musical works to perform the work publicly, at clause (4), and the right in sound recordings to perform by digital audio transmission, at clause (6).
US Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 101 — the definitions of “perform” and of performing a work “publicly,” including the place-open-to-the-public clause quoted here.
US Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 114(a) — that the rights in a sound recording do not include any right of performance under section 106(4).
Copyright Act (Canada), section 3(1) — the sole right to perform the work in public and, at paragraph (f), to communicate it to the public by telecommunication.
Copyright Act (Canada), section 19 — the performer’s and maker’s right to equitable remuneration for a published sound recording performed in public or communicated by telecommunication, paid to the authorised collective society.
BMI, FAQ — Royalties — that BMI royalties are performing right royalties earned when a musical work is performed publicly; that mechanical royalties and synchronization fees are paid directly to the copyright owner; that reciprocal agreements collect foreign performances, most distributed within one and two years; and that a work must be registered to be paid on.
BMI, Royalty Policy Manual — General Information — the 200% unit and the writer and publisher shares; the entire 200% to writers where no performing rights are assigned to a publisher; the registration of percentages; the radio feature performance definition; the list of performances not paid; the television feature, background and theme definitions; the live database of the top 300 tours and events; the Current Activity Payment and per-work rate for digital services; and that payments are based on the licence fees collected from each station.
BMI, BMI Live — who may submit set lists and who may not, the six-month and nine-month windows, the band-member and direct-deposit rules, the domestic-only scope, the quarterly deadlines and the list of ineligible performances.
BMI, Music Licensing — that federal copyright law requires businesses to get permission before publicly performing works, and the kinds of business it lists.
BMI, Digital Licensing — that the licence provides public performance rights in musical works for a digital service and does not include reproduction, distribution or other rights in musical works or sound recordings.
BMI, What is a cue sheet? — the definition, who files it, that it is the primary means by which PROs track music in film and television, and the advice to compare or ask to see it.
SOCAN, Frequently asked questions — the allocation instruction; that a non-member co-writer does not collect until they join SOCAN or an affiliated society; the small and grand rights distinction; that revenues are received from international peers; and the Notification of Live Performance within one year.
SOCAN, About SOCAN — that it issues licences for the public playing, performance, communication and reproduction of music.
The MLC, FAQ — Connect to Collect — that membership does not replace other memberships, naming the PROs and SoundExchange, and that The MLC does not pay separate shares to writers and publishers.
SoundExchange, About — that it is the sole organization designated by the US government to administer the section 114 sound recording licence, paying copyright owners and performers.
Re:Sound, home page — the Canadian not-for-profit licensing company for the performance rights of artists and record companies.

This is not legal advice. Both statutes are quoted for the one sentence each that draws the line, and the pieces linked beside them hold the mechanisms; which country’s law reaches a given song or recording turns on facts this page cannot see. BMI’s rules are BMI’s, quoted from its own published policy, and are not claimed for any other society; ASCAP’s pages could not be read without a browser and nothing on this page is attributed to it. No rate, tariff or per-play figure appears here, because every one of them changes on a schedule this page would go stale against. Every page cited was read on the date at the top of this piece.

Keeping the register

Every society on this page pays a name and an identifier it already holds, so the question underneath the whole piece is whether your own list agrees with theirs. CatalogTracker keeps that list: each party with their IPI and their PRO recorded beside the name, publishing splits per track, and a catalogue searchable by ISRC, ISWC, UPC, GRid, ISNI or IPI. It registers nothing with anybody and it does not collect. It is the sheet you fill the society’s form from. In development for iPhone.