Performance Royalties: How PROs Pay Songwriters for Public Plays

Your song plays on the radio, streams on Spotify, gets performed at a live venue, or airs in a TV show. Each of those is a public performance — and each one generates a performance royalty owed to you as the songwriter. Here's how the money flows and what you need to do to collect it.

What performance royalties are

A performance royalty is paid to songwriters and publishers whenever a composition is performed publicly. “Publicly” is defined broadly — it doesn't just mean a live concert. Any time music is played where people outside a normal circle of family and friends can hear it, that's a public performance under copyright law.

Performance royalties are separate from the money artists and labels earn from streams and sales. Those are recording royalties — they go to whoever owns the master. Performance royalties go to whoever owns the composition. If you wrote the song, this is your money.

What counts as a public performance

More things than you'd expect:

• Radio — terrestrial AM/FM, satellite (SiriusXM), and internet radio (Pandora). Every spin generates performance royalties.
• Interactive streaming— Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Amazon Music. Yes, a single stream generates both a performance royalty and a mechanical royalty — they're collected by different organizations.
• Live venues — concerts, bars, restaurants, clubs, arenas. The venue pays a blanket license fee to PROs, and that money gets distributed to songwriters based on setlists and performance data.
• Television and film— when your song airs in a TV show, commercial, or movie, that's a public performance. This includes broadcast, cable, and streaming platforms.
• Businesses — retail stores, gyms, hotels, restaurants, even hold music on phone systems. If a business plays music that customers can hear, they need a license.

How PROs work: BMI, ASCAP, SESAC, and GMR

Performing Rights Organizations — PROs — are the intermediaries between songwriters and the businesses that use music. They issue licenses to venues, broadcasters, and streaming services, collect the fees, and distribute the royalties to their songwriter and publisher members.

In the US, there are four PROs:

• BMI (Broadcast Music, Inc.) — free to join as a songwriter. Represents over 1.4 million songwriters, composers, and publishers. Pays quarterly.
• ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) — $50 one-time registration fee. Similar size and scope to BMI. Also pays quarterly.
• SESAC — invitation-only. Smaller roster, but represents some high-profile catalogs. Generally considered to have faster payment cycles.
• GMR (Global Music Rights) — the newest PRO, founded in 2013. Invitation-only, focuses on marquee songwriters with high-earning catalogs.

You can only be a member of one PRO at a time as a songwriter. BMI and ASCAP are the practical choices for most independent songwriters — they're open enrollment, well-established, and cover the same licensing footprint.

How the royalty flow works

The path from a song playing on the radio to money in your account goes like this:

1. A radio station, streaming service, or venue plays your song.
2. That entity pays a blanket license fee to your PRO (and the other PROs — most licensees pay all of them).
3. The PRO tracks which songs were performed using a mix of direct reporting (digital services report every play) and sampling (terrestrial radio is monitored via technology like watermarking and pattern recognition).
4. The PRO matches performances to registered works in their database.
5. Royalties are calculated based on the frequency and type of performance, then distributed to the registered songwriters and publishers.

The critical step in that chain: “registered works in their database.” If your song isn't registered with your PRO, they have no way to match performances to you. The royalties still get collected — they just go into a pool that eventually gets distributed based on market share. Meaning: bigger publishers absorb unclaimed royalties.

Registering your works with your PRO

Joining a PRO is step one. Step two — the one many songwriters skip — is registering each individual song. When you register a work, you provide:

• Song title
• All co-writers and their PRO affiliations
• Each writer's ownership percentage
• Publisher information (if applicable)
• ISRC and ISWC codes (if available)

Notice what's in that list: co-writers and ownership percentages. This is exactly the information on your split sheet. If you and two co-writers all register the same song with different ownership percentages, the PRO flags a conflict and holds payments until it's resolved. A signed split sheet is your proof of what everyone agreed to.

Why split sheets matter for performance royalties

When you sit down to register a song with BMI or ASCAP, the form asks for each writer's share. If you wrote the song alone, it's simple — 100%. But if you co-wrote it, you need the exact split that everyone agreed to. That's your split sheet.

Without a split sheet, co-writer disputes can hold up registrations for months. Meanwhile, your song might be getting radio play, racking up streams, airing in TV shows — and none of those performance royalties are reaching you because the work isn't cleanly registered.

The fix is simple: agree on the splits in the session. Document them. Get everyone's signature. Then each writer takes the signed split sheet to their PRO and registers the work with matching percentages. Clean registration, clean payments, no disputes.