Grand Rights in Music: Your PRO Won't Cover It

Grand rights in music are the right to perform a song inside a dramatic work: a musical, an opera, a ballet, a play. They are the one slice of public performance your performing rights organization deliberately does not license on your behalf. So when a theater company emails asking to build a show around your song, there is nobody standing between you and that answer.

The short version: ASCAP and BMI license what the business calls small rights, meaning nondramatic performances, the radio-and-restaurant kind. Grand rights sit outside that grant. ASCAP says it does not license them. BMI tells its own writers not to report those performances at all. The blanket license the venue already pays for every year does not reach a staged production of your song. You license that, or it goes unlicensed.

Small rights and grand rights

Every public performance of a composition falls on one side of a line.

Small rights cover the ordinary case: a song on the radio, a track over a coffee shop speaker, a band playing your song in a club, a stream on Spotify. Your PRO licenses these in bulk. A broadcaster or a bar buys one blanket license, gets millions of songs, and the PRO splits the money among writers and publishers based on what it detects or is told was performed. That machinery is the subject of our guide to what a performing rights organization does, and it is where nearly all of a songwriter's performance royalties come from.

Grand rights cover the dramatic case: your song performed as part of a story. Nobody licenses these in bulk. There is no blanket license, no rate card, and no society writing you a check. The production contacts the copyright owner, the two sides agree on terms, and a license gets signed. If your song appears in a musical, that is a deal you did.

The reason for the split is old and frankly commercial. As ASCAP explains it, in dramatic works "the main motivation is the telling of a story and the music serves to enhance the drama," which was thought to raise the music's value enough that rightsholders concluded they would do better licensing it themselves.

Your PRO says so in writing

This is not a matter of interpretation. Both major US societies put it in plain language on their own websites.

ASCAP's licensing FAQ states that "ASCAP members grant to ASCAP only the right to license nondramatic performances of their copyrighted musical works. Thus, an ASCAP license does not authorize dramatic performances of our members' works." Elsewhere on the same page: "ASCAP does not license 'dramatic' or 'grand' rights, or dramatic performances." Its instruction to a producer staging a musical is to clear the rights directly with the composer, publisher, or licensing agent.

BMI puts it from the writer's side. Its page on reporting classical performances lists what members should not send in, and one line reads: "Grand rights performances, including opera, ballet, dance, musical theater, or other dramatic performances, including incidental music in plays (grand rights are not licensed by BMI; rather, they must be negotiated between rights-holders and presenters)."

Read that twice if you are a BMI writer. Your society is telling you it will not pay you for that performance and will not collect for it either. The details of what each society does handle are in our ASCAP guide and BMI guide.

There is one useful piece of good news buried in the ASCAP language: a blanket license does still authorize nondramatic performances of songs that came from dramatic productions. A radio station playing one song from a musical is covered. A theater staging the musical is not.

Nobody defines the word

Here is the fact that makes this genuinely hard, and it comes from ASCAP itself: "Copyright law does not define the terms 'dramatic' or 'nondramatic.'"

There is no statutory test. ASCAP's own page concedes that the line "is often unclear and depends on the facts pertaining to a particular performance," and that rightsholders, music users, and sometimes the federal courts end up drawing it. The working rule it offers is that a performance turns dramatic when the work is used to tell a story or as part of a story or plot.

Its examples are the most useful thing published on the subject, so here they are side by side:

Two patterns fall out of that list. Ballet music performed as music is fine; the same music with dancers telling the story is not. And volume matters on its own: perform enough of one show's songs together and the performance becomes dramatic even stripped of staging. ASCAP notes that at least one court has called a related version of this the "cavalcade right," where a whole evening built from a single writer's catalog needs the copyright owners' permission.

When the request lands in your inbox

Most independent writers meet grand rights exactly once, and it arrives as a friendly email from a small company: a fringe theater, a dance school, a student production, a devised show at a festival. They have usually already assumed the venue's ASCAP license covers them.

What to do with it:

1. Answer. Silence is the worst outcome. A production that gets no reply frequently uses the song anyway, believing the blanket license applies, and you end up with neither a fee nor a record of permission.
2. Ask what the use actually is. How many performances, what capacity, what ticket price, is the song staged or background, is any of it being filmed. The last one matters most, because a filmed and streamed production is a sync licensing conversation on top of the dramatic one.
3. Check your co-writers before you promise anything. You can only license your own share. A song with three writers needs three yeses, and a producer who hears yes from you will reasonably assume it is handled.
4. Put it in writing, even for a school. One page: the song, the production, the dates and venue, the number of performances, the fee, and a clear statement that this covers this production only.

Here is our opinion, and it runs against how the topic is usually taught. For a small production, say yes quickly and cheaply. The industry writes about grand rights as though every request were a Broadway negotiation, because the literature was written for catalogs that own Oklahoma. It was not written for a working independent writer whose song a dance company wants to use for four nights in a small room. Treating that email as an opening offer usually converts a modest fee and a real credit into nothing at all. Charge something, document it, and move on.

The opposite advice is worth as much: never grant a dramatic license that is open-ended. No perpetual terms, no unnamed future productions, no assignment to whoever the producer sells the show to later. A grand right you signed away casually in 2026 is very hard to get back if the show has a life.

Where an administrator fits, and where it does not

This is the part most writers get wrong about their own deal.

A publishing administrator exists to register your works with societies and collect the money those societies pay: mechanicals, nondramatic performance income, and foreign royalties through reciprocal agreements. A grand right produces none of that. It is a single negotiated license between two parties, with no society in the chain and nothing to collect. So most administration agreements do not cover it, and an administrator who has never mentioned it to you almost certainly is not handling it.

Ask the direct question before you assume: does my agreement grant you dramatic rights, and if a theater contacts you about my song, what happens?

At Davincii the answer is that dramatic licensing stays yours. Our administration grant is non-exclusive, you keep 100% of your copyright, and our terms commit us to never licensing your sync rights without your explicit written approval. The same principle covers a stage. We can tell you whether an offer is reasonable and make sure the registration behind the song is clean, but the yes is yours to give. Our rates and what they do cover are on the pricing page.

What to remember

• Grand rights are dramatic performance rights: your song inside a musical, opera, ballet, or play.
• No PRO licenses them. ASCAP says so directly, and BMI tells its writers those performances are negotiated between rightsholders and presenters.
• The venue's blanket license does not help the production, however long the venue has paid for it.
• Copyright law does not define "dramatic," so the test is practical: is the song being used to tell a story.
• Filmed or streamed productions need a sync conversation as well as a dramatic one.
• Every co-writer has to agree, because you can only license your own share.

One email, once, is the whole exposure for most writers. It is worth knowing what it is when it arrives.