CHAPTER THIRTY

Licensing and the Songwriter’s Side

The four PROs from the artist’s chair, and the room’s licensing duty.

We’ve covered the money that comes from playing — the gig fee, the merch table. There’s another stream of music money entirely, one that flows not from the performance but from the song itself, and that most working musicians either don’t understand or don’t bother to collect. It’s the performance royalty: the money a songwriter is owed every time their song is publicly performed — played live, spun on the radio, streamed, used on television. The song, it turns out, is a piece of property that earns its writer money whenever it’s used in public, and there’s an entire system built to collect that money and route it to the people who wrote the songs. If you write songs and you’re not plugged into that system, you’re leaving money — maybe a little, maybe eventually a lot — uncollected on the table.

That system runs on organizations called performing rights organizations, or PROs, and understanding them is understanding both how a songwriter gets paid and why the rooms you play have to be licensed. There are four PROs in the United States, and we’ll name and walk through all of them, because this is exactly the kind of business knowledge that separates a musician who treats the craft as a profession from one who leaves money and understanding on the floor. We’ll cover what the PROs are and how a songwriter affiliates with one; the crucial distinction between your original songs and the covers you play, and who gets paid in each case; and the room’s own side of this — the public-performance license every venue hosting music is legally obligated to carry.

A word of caution before we start, the same one that’s run through this whole part of the book: this is a genuinely complex corner of copyright and music law, and what follows is general information to help you understand the landscape, not legal advice. The details carry real legal and financial weight, they change, and they apply differently to different situations. For the songwriter’s side, the PROs themselves are a resource and a qualified music attorney is worth consulting; for anything with real money or real stakes on the line, get professional advice. With that understood, let’s look at how the song earns, starting with the system that makes it happen.

30.1 The Song Earns Its Own Money

Start with the idea underneath the whole system, because it’s the thing most performers never quite absorb: when you write a song, you own a piece of intellectual property, and that property earns money on its own, separately from any performance fee you collect for playing it. The law gives the songwriter a set of rights in the composition, and one of those is the right to control its public performance. Which means that whenever your song is performed in public — by you on a stage, by a radio station over the air, by a streaming service, by another band covering it — you, as the writer, are owed a small payment called a performance royalty. The song works for you even when you’re not in the room. That’s a fundamentally different kind of money from the gig fee, and a kind most working musicians underuse.

An important distinction sits right at the heart of this, and getting it straight saves a lot of confusion: performance royalties belong to the songwriter — the person who wrote the composition — not to the performer or the recording as such. If you write your own songs, you wear both hats, but the royalty flows to you in your capacity as the writer. This is also why the system we’re describing is built around songwriters and publishers rather than recording artists: it’s the underlying song that’s earning, not the particular recording of it. There’s a separate world of royalties for the sound recording itself — a different lane from the songwriter’s performance royalty we’re focused on here — but it’s worth one pointer, because the theme of this chapter is not leaving money uncollected: if you make recordings that get non-interactive digital play, on the likes of SiriusXM, Pandora, or internet radio, a parallel stream on the recording side is collected by an organization called SoundExchange, separate from your PRO and worth looking into if it applies to you. The takeaway is simple: if you write, the writing itself is an asset that earns.

Here’s the practical problem the system exists to solve. Your song might be performed in thousands of places — bars, radio stations, streaming platforms, other bands’ sets — and there’s no conceivable way for you, one songwriter, to track every one of those performances, bill each venue and station, and collect a few cents or dollars from each. It would be a full-time job many times over, and an impossible one. So the industry built collective organizations to do it at scale: they license the music to all those users in bulk, collect the money, track performances as best they can, and distribute royalties to the songwriters they represent. Those organizations are the PROs, and affiliating with one is how a songwriter taps into this collection machine rather than trying, hopelessly, to do it alone. The arrangement is a kind of grand bargain that’s been running for over a century: songwriters pool their right to collect, the businesses that use music pay one organization instead of negotiating with every writer alive, and the money gets divided out by formulas based on how often and how widely each song gets played. It’s imperfect, especially at the small-venue end, but it’s the only thing that makes collecting at this scale possible at all. Let’s meet them.

30.2 The Four PROs

There are four performing rights organizations in the United States, and they do the same essential job: they represent songwriters and publishers, license those writers’ songs to the businesses that perform them publicly, collect the resulting royalties, and pay them out to their affiliated writers. The four are ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, and GMR. They split into two very different groups by how you get in. ASCAP and BMI are the two giants, both open to essentially any songwriter who wants to join — between them they represent the overwhelming majority of working songwriters, and for almost everyone reading this, the practical choice comes down to one of these two. SESAC and GMR are the other kind: smaller, for-profit, and invitation-only, representing select rosters you don’t apply to so much as get recruited into once you’re a significant writer.

Because ASCAP and BMI are where most musicians actually land, a little detail on them. ASCAP, the oldest, founded back in 1914, is a nonprofit owned by its songwriter and publisher members; it’s open to all and charges a modest one-time fee to join. BMI, founded in 1939, is the largest of the PROs and is open to all as well, with no fee to join as a songwriter. Both do fundamentally the same work with small differences in contract terms, payout timing, and member perks, and choosing between them is a real but not life-or-death decision — you research both and pick, and a music attorney can help you weigh it if your stakes warrant. One firm rule holds across all of them: you affiliate with only one PRO at a time. You can’t collect from two at once, and switching is possible only at certain intervals, so the choice, while not irreversible, isn’t one you flip casually.

SESAC and GMR round out the four, and they’re worth knowing about even though most musicians won’t join them. SESAC, for-profit and invitation-only, keeps a smaller, more curated roster. GMR — Global Music Rights — is the newcomer, founded in 2013 by music-industry power broker Irving Azoff, also for-profit and invite-only, built around a roster of superstar writers. You don’t choose these; they choose you, and only at a level most working musicians are aiming toward rather than sitting at. However you get in, the mechanics of being affiliated are similar: you register your songs with your PRO so they know what catalog they’re collecting for, and from then on the PRO licenses those songs out, tracks their performance, and pays you your share of what it collects. One detail here is worth more than it first appears: a song’s performance royalties divide into two halves, a writer’s share and a publisher’s share, commonly split fifty-fifty. If you have no publishing deal, you own that publisher’s share yourself, and depending on the PRO, collecting it means registering your own publishing entity alongside your writer affiliation. This sounds like bureaucratic busywork, but skipping it can mean leaving the publisher’s half of your own royalties sitting uncollected; registering the publishing side is how you collect both halves of what your song earns, and it’s something the PRO walks you through.

30.3 Originals, Covers, and Who Gets Paid

Now the distinction that matters most to a working musician who, like most, plays a mix of their own songs and other people’s: originals versus covers, and who gets paid in each case. Start with your originals. When you write a song, it’s your copyright, and every public performance of it potentially generates a performance royalty for you — when you play it on a licensed stage, when it gets radio play, when it’s streamed, and especially when another act covers it. This is the income stream the whole chapter has been building toward: your own songs, performed out in the world, earning you royalties through your PRO. It’s the reason writing original material matters not just artistically but financially, because your originals are the only songs in your set that can route royalty money back to you. Put bluntly, the covers in your set build other writers’ royalty checks while your originals build yours — which is one more reason, beyond pride and artistry, that original material is worth the harder work of writing it. Every original you put in the set is a small asset you own; every cover is a borrowed one you don’t.

Covers work the opposite way, and understanding this clarifies the whole system. When you play someone else’s song, you’re publicly performing their copyright, not yours — so any performance royalty generated by that cover belongs to the songwriter who wrote it, not to you, the performer. This is entirely legal and normal, provided the venue is properly licensed, because the room’s PRO licenses are what grant the legal right to publicly perform those copyrighted songs on the premises. So when your band covers a classic at a licensed honky-tonk, the original songwriter earns a sliver of royalty through that room’s license, and you earn your gig fee for playing — but not a performance royalty, because it wasn’t your song. The performer of a cover generates royalties for the writer, not for themselves.

Now the honest reality check, because it matters. For a working bar band playing its originals in small rooms, the actual performance royalties from those live shows are often small — live-venue performance tracking is imperfect, especially for little rooms, and the per-performance amounts are modest. So nobody should affiliate expecting the bar gigs alone to make them rich in royalties. But two things are true anyway: it’s real money, and it grows with your reach. As your songs get radio play, rack up streams, get performed at bigger licensed venues, or get covered by other acts, the royalty stream can grow from a trickle into something meaningful — and you can’t collect a cent of any of it if you never affiliated and never registered your songs. So the action is clear for anyone who writes: affiliate with a PRO, register your songs, and set up the pipe, so that whatever your originals earn — now and as you grow — actually finds its way to you instead of sitting uncollected in the system. One more piece matters enormously in a band, where songs are so often written together: when you co-write, the royalties divide among the writers by agreed shares — your songwriter splits — and each writer registers their own percentage with their own PRO. Sort out and write down who wrote what, in what share, while the goodwill is fresh and the memory clear, because undocumented splits are one of the ugliest and most common fights a band ever has. Agree them, register them, and you head off a world of trouble.

30.4 The Room’s License to Host the Music

Flip to the room’s side, which is the other half of this system and a real legal obligation tying directly back to the venue-operations ground covered in earlier volumes. To host music in a public business — live bands, recorded music over the speakers, a jukebox, any of it — a venue generally needs public-performance licenses from the PROs. This is the venue’s legal responsibility, not the band’s: the room is the business publicly performing the copyrighted music, or hosting its performance, and the room is the party that has to be licensed. A band playing covers at a properly licensed room is covered by that room’s licenses; the obligation to carry them sits squarely with the venue.

Two practical points define how this works. First, each PRO licenses its own repertory, and a night’s music may pull from several of them. ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, and GMR are the four major U.S. PROs most venues encounter, but they are not the only organizations claiming U.S. performance repertories. A venue should identify the music it uses and obtain appropriate authorization rather than assume a fixed four-license checklist is universally complete. Many venues use blanket licenses from the relevant organizations, which is far simpler than trying to license song by song. Second, and this one trips up a lot of owners: a consumer streaming subscription does not cover any of this. Playing your personal Spotify or Apple Music account over the venue’s speakers is licensed for private use only, not commercial public performance, and using it that way in your business does not satisfy the licensing requirement and can actually add to your exposure.

The reason this isn’t optional is that the penalties are real and steep. Performing copyrighted music publicly without the proper licenses is copyright infringement, and the federal statutory damages for infringement start at hundreds of dollars per song and can run to many tens of thousands per song for willful violations — figures that multiply fast across a single setlist, and that can come bundled with the PROs’ legal fees on top. And the PROs do enforce: they actively monitor venues, including through public listings and social media, and pursue the ones performing their catalogs unlicensed. For an owner, the bottom line is that proper licensing is simply a cost of doing business with music, far cheaper than the risk of skipping it. For the band, understanding this explains why the rooms you play carry these licenses — and why a room hosting live music without them is a room cutting a genuinely dangerous corner. It’s also worth a band knowing, quietly, that a room playing fast and loose with its licensing is a room with a certain carelessness about the law that tends to show up in other corners of how it operates — the licensing status is a small tell about the professionalism of the whole operation.

30.5 Two Sides of the Same License

Step back and you can see the whole circuit, and how neatly it connects the two chairs this book keeps returning to. On one side, the songwriter affiliates with a PRO to collect what their songs earn when performed. On the other, the venue buys licenses from those same PROs to legally host music on its premises. And the money runs between them: a meaningful share of what venues, radio stations, and streaming services pay the PROs flows back out to the songwriters whose songs got played. The room’s license, in other words, is part of what actually pays the songwriter whose song your band covered on that stage. The two sides aren’t separate transactions; they’re two ends of the same pipe. Money goes in where music gets used — the venue’s annual checks, the radio station’s fees, the streaming service’s payments — and comes out where music gets made, in the royalty statements of the writers. The PRO is the plumbing in between, and both the songwriter and the venue owner are connected to it, just from opposite ends.

Which is why a musician who really understands this business grasps both ends at once. As a writer, you affiliate and register and collect what your own originals earn out in the world. As someone who plays rooms, you understand that the venue’s licensing is what makes your covers legal and what routes royalties to the writers you’re covering — and that your own originals, performed in those same licensed rooms, can earn for you in turn. Understanding the full circuit makes you a more complete professional: you know where the money comes from and where it goes, you collect what you’re owed, and you appreciate what the room carries so that music can legally happen there at all. That understanding is itself a kind of respect, flowing both ways across the system.

And that mutual understanding deepens the relationship at the center of this book. A band that grasps the room’s licensing burden respects a real cost the room shoulders to host live music; a room that understands its license is part of how songwriters get paid sees that license not as a nuisance fee but as its small part in keeping the whole music ecosystem alive. Both chairs are served by understanding the system that links them. All of this has been about the rights in your songs — the compositions you write and the royalties they earn. But your songs aren’t your only intellectual property. Your band’s name, your logo, your photographs, your recordings, your very likeness — these are assets too, valuable ones, and protecting them and controlling who gets to use them to promote is its own essential subject. The book turns now from the rights in your songs to the rights in your name and image. Name, image, likeness, and the rest of your intellectual property is next.