Music PROs Explained

Somewhere right now, one of your songs is playing. Maybe it’s in a coffee shop in Edinburgh, maybe it’s on a Spotify playlist in São Paulo, maybe it’s soundtracking a scene in a television drama you’ve never seen. If you’ve registered with a Performing Rights Organisation, money is — slowly, imperfectly, but genuinely — moving toward you. If you haven’t, it isn’t.

This is not a complicated idea, but the machinery around it is dense enough that most independent musicians either ignore it entirely or register once and never think about it again. Both approaches leave money on the table. Understanding what PROs actually do, and why the distinctions they draw matter, is one of the most practically useful things a working songwriter can do for themselves.

What a PRO Actually Is

A Performing Rights Organisation exists to solve a problem of scale. When a radio station plays ten thousand songs a week, it cannot negotiate individually with ten thousand rights holders. When a bar owner wants to legally play recorded music for customers, they cannot track down every songwriter whose work might come through the speakers. The system would collapse under its own weight before a note was played.

PROs solve this by acting as collective licensing bodies. They grant blanket licences to businesses — broadcasters, streaming platforms, venues, airlines, gyms, restaurants, hotels — in exchange for fees calculated against their usage, revenue, or size. They then distribute those fees back to rights holders according to how their music was actually used. The PRO sits in the middle, absorbing the impossibility of the transaction and making it workable for everyone.

The major organisations are PRS for Music (UK and much of the world via reciprocal agreements), ASCAP and BMI (both US-based, both non-profit in structure, both enormous), SESAC (US, smaller and invitation-only), and GEMA (Germany, with one of the most rigorous tracking systems in the world). There are many others — SOCAN in Canada, APRA AMCOS in Australia, SACEM in France — and they all talk to each other. Register with one, and through those reciprocal agreements, you have reach into territories your PRO doesn’t directly cover.

What Performance Rights Actually Mean

The word “performance” in this context is broader than you’d expect. It doesn’t just mean a live concert. Under copyright law, a “public performance” includes broadcast radio, television, streaming, background music in a shop, music played in a waiting room, a DJ set in a club, a song used in a podcast, a Spotify stream. Any time music is performed or communicated to the public, a performance royalty is — in principle — owed.

This royalty is owed on the underlying composition: the melody and the lyrics. Not the recording. This distinction is fundamental, and it’s the source of enormous confusion among musicians who write, record, and release their own work, because those are actually two separate things in copyright law.

The composition copyright belongs to the songwriter. The sound recording copyright — sometimes called the master — belongs to whoever paid for and owns the recording, often a label, sometimes the artist themselves. When a song is streamed or broadcast, two sets of royalties are potentially generated. The PRO collects and distributes performance royalties for the composition. A separate system handles royalties for the master recording.

Mechanical Rights: The Other Half

Mechanical rights are the rights to reproduce a composition — to press it onto a physical medium, to distribute it digitally, to make it exist as a copy. The term comes from the age of player piano rolls, when “mechanical reproduction” was a literal description of how music was duplicated. The language is antique; the right is very much alive.

When someone streams your song, the streaming platform owes both a performance royalty (for the act of communicating the music to a listener) and a mechanical royalty (for the act of reproducing the composition in the digital delivery). In the US, these have historically been collected by separate organisations — performance rights by ASCAP, BMI, or SESAC, and mechanical rights by the Harry Fox Agency or, increasingly now, by the Mechanical Licensing Collective (the MLC), which was established under the Music Modernization Act of 2018.

In the UK, PRS handles performance rights and MCPS (the Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society, which operates alongside PRS for Music) handles mechanicals. Joining PRS for Music gives you access to both through a combined membership.

The practical point: if you’re only registered with a PRO, you may be collecting your performance royalties but missing your mechanical royalties entirely, or vice versa. The two streams are distinct and require separate attention.

How the Money Actually Flows

PROs collect money from licence fees paid by businesses. They then attempt to distribute it according to actual usage. This is harder than it sounds.

Radio stations in most territories are required to submit full logs of everything they play. Major television broadcasters do the same. Streaming platforms report play counts. From this data, PROs calculate distributions — usually quarterly, sometimes semi-annually — and pay out to registered members whose works appear in the logs.

Live performance royalties work differently. In the UK, PRS asks venues to submit setlists, and they may also use statistical sampling — extrapolating from known data to estimate what’s being played in smaller venues. Some countries are more rigorous than others. GEMA, for instance, has a reputation for unusually thorough tracking. Some territories rely heavily on sampling and statistical modelling, which means that less prominent works can fall through the cracks.

This is why registering your songs as individual works matters. A PRO can only pay you for works it knows you wrote. If you have an account but haven’t registered your catalogue, the system has no way to route money to you even when it knows your music was played. The account is the door; the registered works are the address.

The Publisher Share and Why It Matters Even If You Have No Publisher

Performance royalties are split into two portions: the writer’s share and the publisher’s share. Historically, songwriters worked with music publishers who handled the administration of their rights, and the split reflected that relationship. The publisher’s share — often 50% of the total royalty — goes to whoever is designated as the publisher of a work.

If you have a traditional publishing deal, your publisher collects their share directly. If you don’t have a publisher — which describes most independent artists — you can designate yourself as your own publisher. At PRS for Music, this means joining as both a writer member and setting up a publisher entity. At ASCAP and BMI, the process is similar. If you don’t do this, the publisher’s share of your royalties may sit unclaimed or be distributed into a general pool.

This is not a small amount. Missing the publisher’s share means missing half of every performance royalty generated by your work. For many independent songwriters, correcting this single oversight would meaningfully change their annual income from music.

Choosing Where to Register

If you’re based in the UK, join PRS for Music. If you’re in the US, choose between ASCAP and BMI — there’s no meaningful functional difference for most independent artists, though both have passionate advocates. SESAC requires an invitation. If you’re based elsewhere, research your territory’s designated PRO; most countries have one, and many have legal requirements that music used commercially must be licensed through it.

You can only be a member of one PRO in your home territory for your songwriter rights. But if you write in collaboration with someone registered elsewhere — a co-writer in Germany, say, while you’re in the US — each of you registers your share with your respective PRO, and the reciprocal agreements between those organisations handle the cross-border accounting.

When you register a work with a co-writer, you’ll need to agree on and declare the ownership split. This is worth getting right before the song is released rather than after it starts generating royalties. Disputes about splits after the fact are unpleasant and sometimes expensive. A simple written agreement between collaborators — even an email — can save a great deal of grief.

What PROs Cannot Do

It’s worth being clear-eyed about the limitations. PROs are not omniscient. They don’t catch every play of every song in every territory. Smaller venues, independent podcasts, international markets with less rigorous licensing enforcement — these are gaps in the system. Some royalties that are technically owed are never collected, or are collected into pools and distributed according to market share rather than actual usage, which tends to benefit artists with larger catalogues and more leverage.

PROs also don’t handle sync licensing — the fees paid to use music in film, television, advertising, or games. Sync deals are negotiated directly, usually between the rights holder (or their publisher or agent) and the person or company wanting to use the music. The PRO relationship is separate. If your song is placed in a television series, the PRO will collect performance royalties each time the episode broadcasts, but the upfront sync fee for the placement is a separate negotiation entirely.

And PROs don’t collect on the master recording side. Neighbouring rights — the performance royalties owed to recording artists and labels when sound recordings are broadcast or performed publicly — are collected by separate organisations: PPL in the UK, SoundExchange in the US, and their equivalents elsewhere. If you own your masters, you should be registered with these organisations as well as your PRO.

The Register-Everything Principle

The music industry has an unfortunate habit of making rights administration feel optional or premature — something to worry about once you’ve “made it.” The reality is the opposite. The earlier you register your works, the more complete your catalogue record will be, and the more royalties you’ll capture as your music reaches new contexts and territories over time.

Songs have long lives. A track you released independently five years ago might appear in a documentary next year, or find a new audience through an algorithm, or be covered by an artist with a larger following. The royalties those moments generate belong to you, but only if the system can find you.

Registration is not bureaucracy for its own sake. It is the act of raising your hand and saying: I made this. I am here. Send me what you owe.

Resonillator’s songwriting and composition tools can be found in the Modules section — a good place to start building the catalogue worth registering.