Explore public performance rights, performance royalties, performing rights organizations, digital performance royalties, and how music creators register and collect this income.

Outcome. Affiliate correctly on both the composition and the recording side, and collect from each.

A public performance is any audible transmission of a copyrighted musical work heard by a public audience. Live, digital, vinyl, radio, a restaurant, a gym. The fee a venue pays a band is not a public performance licence; they are different charges.

Performing rights organizations exist so a business can clear a whole repertoire at once. BMI, ASCAP, SESAC and GMR in the United States, PRS and PPL in the United Kingdom, and their counterparts elsewhere. A blanket licence covers everything in that catalog.

A songwriter can affiliate with only one PRO at a time. A publisher can affiliate with all of them. PROs usually pay writers and publishers directly rather than routing the writer share through the publisher.

The recording side is separate and is the stream most independent artists miss. Digital performance royalties owed to featured artists and rights owners for non interactive digital use are collected in the United States by SoundExchange, and they are not paid by your PRO, your distributor or the MLC. They have to be claimed.

What you will produce

A PRO affiliation with every work registered, and a SoundExchange registration covering both your artist side and your rights owner side.