At some point in your career as an original artist, you will hear about signing up with a Performance Rights Organization (PRO). For American artists, there are only two major choices to choose from: ASCAP or BMI. With only two choices, you might expect the differences to be significant. You may also wonder, since there are only two choices, how important and necessary it is to join one. A performing rights organization’s sole purpose is to handle the collection of royalties owed to its members.
ASCAP
ASCAP stands for the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers. ASCAP was started nearly 100 years ago on February 13, 1914. Writers and publishers wanting to enforce the copyright law and manage the collecting of money of artists who had their music being used in a live performance setting founded it. Eventually this was extended to include new forms of music usage such as broadcasting and recording. As it says on ASCAP’s website, they have over “480,000 US composers, songwriters, lyricists and music publishers of every kind of music.” ASCAP is a non-profit organization and is controlled by the members in effect due to the Board of Directors is elected by the members. Membership is a one-time fee of $50 for writers and $50 for a publisher. The catch with ASCAP is that in order to collect the publisher’s share of royalties on your music you will need to have an ASCAP publishing company.
BMI
Broadcast Music, Inc. was founded in 1939 by radio executives as a non-profit organization. BMI likes to boast they are “owned by more than 600,000 songwriters, composers and music publishers.” Like ASCAP, BMI was founded to handle the collection of royalty payments but was meant to be “a bridge between songwriters and the businesses and organizations that play their music publicly.” The fee structure is very different from ASCAP’s as songwriters can join for free while publishers have to pay a one-time fee of $250. You also do not need a publishing company to collect the publisher’s share of royalties with BMI.
Do I Need To Join a PRO?
Joining a PRO isn’t actually a necessity for many artists. Unless you have a hit song, you may not see much in return from your chosen PRO. Even though the PROs pay you the royalties, because they only charge a one-time fee (or nothing for songwriters with BMI) they take a percentage of the royalties coming in to maintain themselves. It also takes time for the PROs to process the royalties, so signing up ahead of time is a necessity. Unless you have reason to expect significant song usage, you may not see any money for a while. You definitely don’t want to wait until you have a hit song before you join so think realistically about what you expect to happen soon with your music. There are also numerous cases of songwriter teams being split between the two PROs and the different songwriters receiving very different payouts for the same song used in exactly the same way.
In the end, which performing rights organization you decide to join with, if you join one at all, is entirely up to you. If you are only selling a few CDs and digital downloads here and there, then you may not be able to justify the expense. But if you are marketing your songs on a service such as Taxi for commercials, movies, and such then joining a PRO should be a priority.