ASCAP paid songwriters and publishers $1.76 billion in 2025. BMI distributed $1.47 billion the year before. SESAC keeps its numbers private. Global Music Rights represents about 200 of the most powerful songwriters alive and answers to almost nobody.
These are the four performing rights organizations operating in the United States. They are why your favorite songwriter gets paid when a song plays in a Phoenix Starbucks, a Dublin sitcom, or a São Paulo playlist. They are also why most songwriters affiliated with them couldn't explain in plain English what their PRO actually does.
If you write songs, joining a performing rights organization is one of the first business decisions you'll make. If you invest in music royalties, understanding PROs is non-negotiable. They are the plumbing of the publishing side of the business, and the money flowing through them is among the most durable income in any asset class.
Here's what they are, what they do, and how to think about them.
What Is a Performing Rights Organization (PRO)?
A performing rights organization is a music rights organization that licenses public performances of musical compositions, tracks where and when those compositions get played, collects fees from the businesses doing the playing, and pays the songwriters and publishers who own the work.
The phrase "public performance" sounds quaint. It isn’t. It covers radio, network and cable TV, streaming services, live venues, restaurants, retail stores, gyms, bars, hold music on a customer service line, the song in a hotel lobby, and the soundtrack rolling under a TikTok ad. Anywhere music plays in front of an audience that isn't your living room, a performance royalty is due.
Now imagine you're a songwriter trying to chase down every Holiday Inn lounge, every fitness studio, every podcast intro, every public broadcast of your work, every quarter, across the country. You can't. Nobody can. That’s the problem PROs solve. They gather licensing on behalf of millions of compositions and hand the money back to the people who wrote them.
Without PROs, performance royalties wouldn’t exist as an income stream. They would exist as a theoretical right nobody could afford to enforce.
How Do Performing Rights Organizations Work?
Three functions. Each one industrial in scale.
Blanket Licensing
A radio station that wants to play music doesn't negotiate with each songwriter individually. It buys a blanket license from each PRO, which grants the right to play anything in that PRO's catalog.
One fee, one contract, millions of songs. Multiply that across hundreds of thousands of businesses and tens of thousands of broadcasters, and you get the revenue base.
Tracking
This is the harder part. PROs use a mix of digital fingerprinting, station logs, streaming reports, cue sheets, and statistical sampling to figure out what gets played, where, and how often.
ASCAP says it processes more than a trillion performances a year. BMI tracks 25 million musical works. The systems aren’t perfect. They are better than anything else available, and getting better every year.
Distribution
Every quarter, the PRO takes what it has collected, subtracts its operating costs, and divides the rest among the songwriters and publishers whose music it tracked.
The formulas are public and complex. They weigh performance type, audience size, venue category, time of day, and several other variables. A spin on a major market radio station pays differently from a stream on Apple Music, which pays differently from a play in a coffee shop in Toledo. The math is opaque to outsiders. The output is a check, four times a year.
4 Types of Performing Rights Organizations in the U.S.
Four U.S. PROs handle public performance rights for compositions. Here's the lay of the land.
ASCAP
Founded in 1914, ASCAP has over 1.1 million members. It's the oldest U.S. PRO and the only major one not owned by private equity. The organization is structured as a not-for-profit owned by its members.
It operates under a Department of Justice consent decree dating to 1941. ASCAP distributed $1.76 billion in 2025, which is the highest annual distribution in any PRO's history.
BMI
Founded in 1939, BMI is the largest U.S. PRO by catalog, with over 1.4 million affiliates and 25 million works. It was originally a not-for-profit.
However, it was sold to the private equity firm New Mountain Capital in 2024 and converted to a for-profit model. BMI now targets distributing 85% of licensing revenue to affiliates. It also operates under a federal consent decree.
SESAC
Founded in 1930, SESAC is a private, for-profit organization owned by Blackstone, and it's invitation-only. Its membership includes around 15,000 writers, which is down from 35,000 in 2019.
SESAC doesn't operate under a consent decree, which gives it more leverage in rate negotiations. It also doesn't publish its distribution figures.
Global Music Rights (GMR)
Founded in 2013 by Irving Azoff, GMR is an invitation-only organization. Its roster includes between 150 and 200 songwriters and estates, including Bruce Springsteen, Drake, Pharrell, the Eagles writers, the John Lennon estate, the Metallica writers, and similar companies.
Hellman & Friedman acquired a majority stake in late 2024 at a valuation around $3.3 billion. GMR doesn't operate under a consent decree either.
SoundExchange Isn’t a PRO
SoundExchange collects digital performance royalties for sound recordings, not compositions. Different copyright, different money, different beneficiaries.
SoundExchange pays the recording artist and the master owner. A PRO pays the songwriter and the publisher. If you're both, you need to register with both. If you only register with one, you're collecting half of what you're owed.
How International PROs Work
Internationally, every major market has its own PRO performing the same function for its territory. A few you'll see referenced often:
- PRS for Music (United Kingdom)
- SOCAN (Canada)
- GEMA (Germany)
- SACEM (France)
- APRA AMCOS (Australia and New Zealand)
These organizations have reciprocal agreements with U.S. PROs. When a Drake song plays in a Paris cafe, SACEM collects the fee and routes it back through GMR to the writers. A song that travels widely earns royalties in dozens of jurisdictions, often for decades.
How to Choose and Join a Performing Rights Organization
A U.S. songwriter can only affiliate with one PRO at a time. A publisher can affiliate with several. The choice matters, and not always for the reasons most articles suggest.
For most new songwriters, the real decision is between ASCAP and BMI. SESAC and GMR are invite-only. If they want you, they will find you.
A few factors actually move the needle:
- Cost: Joining ASCAP as a writer is free. Publisher-only membership is $50. Joining BMI as a writer is also free. Practical difference on cost alone: essentially zero.
- Payment timing: ASCAP and BMI distribute payments quarterly, typically six to nine months after the performance. SESAC pays monthly, which is one of its selling points for the writers it invites.
- Contract flexibility: ASCAP writer contracts run one year and auto-renew. BMI writer contracts run two years. Departure procedures with each aren’t casual: there are notice windows, restricted resignation periods, and royalty trail rules. Read the agreement before you sign it.
- Ownership structure: ASCAP is owned by its members and returns roughly 90 cents on every dollar collected. BMI now targets 85 cents. SESAC and GMR are privately held and don't disclose their distribution percentages. Some songwriters care about this. Others don't.
For a full side-by-side, our ASCAP vs. BMI vs. SESAC comparison breaks it down further.
PRO Registration Process
Once you've chosen, the registration process is straightforward for most PROs:
- Sign up for a writer account on the PRO's website.
- If you control your own publishing, set up a publisher account as well, often as a separate entity.
- Register every single song you've written as a work. Include co-writer splits and publisher splits.
The last step is the one new affiliates miss most often. Signing up isn’t enough. You have to register each song. A song that isn't registered is a song that doesn't exist, from the PRO's point of view.
What PROs Collect and What They Don't
A BMI performing rights organization affiliation, or an ASCAP one, collects performance royalties. That’s it.
What they don't collect:
- Mechanical royalties on streaming and downloads: These flow through the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) for U.S. on-demand streams. If you're not registered with the MLC, you’re leaving streaming mechanicals unclaimed.
- Sync royalties from film, TV, advertising, and games: These are negotiated directly by you, your publisher, or a sync agent.
- Digital sound recording royalties from non-interactive services like SiriusXM and Pandora: These flow through SoundExchange to recording artists and master owners.
- Master recording royalties from on-demand streams and downloads: These move through labels and distributors to recording artists.
A registered PRO affiliation handles one income stream well. The full income picture for a working songwriter requires multiple registrations across multiple collection organizations. For the full map, see our breakdown of royalty distribution: who collects what for whom.
What You Can Do With Your PRO Royalties
Most songwriters treat PRO royalties as mailbox money. A check arrives every quarter. They cash it. They wait for the next one.
There’s another option. If you have a catalog already generating performance royalties, you can sell a portion of your future income on Royalty Exchange and raise money on your own terms. You choose what percentage to sell. You keep earning on the rest. You never give up the copyright.
What you get is liquidity. What buyers get is a piece of a durable, decades-long income stream backed by the collection infrastructure of the most established music rights organizations in the world. Both sides of that trade are sophisticated and have done the math.
Want to see what your catalog is worth? Get an offer. It’s free and tells you what the market will pay.
.png)
