How to Submit a Setlist to ASCAP and BMI

Setlist submission at ASCAP and BMI is the one piece of songwriter income that arrives only if you ask for it. Play your own songs at a licensed venue and the venue has already paid your society a blanket license fee. Nothing routes that fee to you until somebody files a setlist, and at both societies the only person allowed to file it is the writer who played the show. ASCAP's program is called OnStage, BMI's is called BMI Live, and both want writer membership and direct deposit in place before you can submit anything at all.

The deadline is the expensive part, so lead with it: ASCAP will not process a fourth-quarter performance claimed after March 31, which leaves about three months for a show played the week after Christmas.

Why nothing happens automatically

For non-classical work, ASCAP runs two separate live lanes, and knowing which one you are in tells you whether you have homework. (Symphonic and concert music uses a third route, covered further down.)

The first is the concert survey. ASCAP distributes royalties for songs performed on the top-grossing tours and festivals each quarter, as reported by Pollstar, covering headliners and opening acts, and it says it requests setlists directly from managers, promoters and venues where those are available. The result, in ASCAP's own number, is that it pays over 2,500 unique acts per year for live performance.

BMI runs the same shape of program and publishes the size of it. Its royalty policy manual says BMI uses an independent source of live pop concert information to build a database of the top 300 concert tours, events and festivals each quarter, and calculates a payment for each BMI-licensed work performed at those events.

Read those two numbers twice, because together they are the whole argument for this page. Over 2,500 acts a year at ASCAP, a top-300 list at BMI, in a country with tens of thousands of working songwriters playing licensed rooms every weekend. If your show is not on that list, nobody is collecting your setlist for you.

The second lane is the one you drive. ASCAP OnStage exists for performances at ASCAP-licensed venues that fall outside the top-grossing survey, and it works on claims you file yourself. BMI Live is BMI's equivalent. Neither is a genre program and neither has a venue-size floor: ASCAP says you can collect when you play your music live at a licensed venue of any size.

What both are is a performance royalty claim, filed by hand, on a clock.

ASCAP OnStage, in order

1. Be a writer member. ASCAP is explicit that all OnStage claims must be submitted by writers of the performed works. A publisher-only account cannot file.
2. Switch on direct deposit. ASCAP requires direct deposit as your default payment preference before you can submit a setlist, and sets it under Payment Information in the Profile section of Member Access. This stops more first attempts than anything else.
3. Register the songs first. Every title on the setlist has to exist in your ASCAP catalog already. ASCAP says a new registration can take up to seven days to process, so a song written at soundcheck is not claimable that night. The ASCAP guide covers the account and work registration steps, and your IPI number is the identifier the society matches you by on whatever you file.
4. File the claim. OnStage lives in Member Access under Works, and ASCAP describes it as available around the clock.
5. Fix mistakes early. A claim can be withdrawn and edited in Member Access only while it remains inside the same distribution period.

One writer per band is enough. ASCAP says a single claim ensures all writers and publishers properly listed on the title registration receive a royalty, and the others can see the submitted claim in their own accounts.

BMI Live, in order

BMI's shape is similar and its details are not.

1. Be a performing songwriter with BMI, enrolled in direct deposit. BMI states the direct deposit requirement plainly as a condition of participating, and the BMI guide covers that enrollment along with the payout thresholds it also unlocks.
2. Enter the performance in BMI Online Services or the BMI mobile app. BMI asks for the performance day and time, the setlist and the venue information.
3. Expect verification. BMI says it reserves the right to issue payments based on its ability to verify the submitted event details, so the venue and date you type in matter.
4. Invite the band if it helps. Only one member needs to log a performance, and you can invite the rest from inside the program. But BMI pays only those band members who are themselves BMI members, so a co-writer sitting at ASCAP collects nothing from your BMI Live claim. If that co-writer played the show too, they can file their own OnStage claim at ASCAP. If they only wrote and did not perform, neither program gives them a route in, because both require the claim to come from a writer who was on stage.

BMI Live is domestic only. For a show outside the US, BMI points writers to its International Live Performance Notification Form instead, and ASCAP tells foreign affiliates to claim through their own society first.

The deadlines, side by side

ASCAP publishes fixed quarterly cutoffs. BMI describes a rolling window of roughly nine months and publishes its own dated deadlines.

The arithmetic hiding in that table is worth doing once. The cutoff is fixed to the quarter, not to your gig, so a show in the first week of a quarter buys you close to six months and a show in the last week of the same quarter buys you three. A gig on December 28 is claimable until March 31 and no later. ASCAP's language on missing it has no give in it: if you miss the deadline, it will not be able to process your claim.

BMI's window is wider. Its FAQ says performances are generally eligible for submission up to nine months after the performance date, and its submission table shows a first-quarter 2026 performance still claimable by September 30, 2026 for payment that November. BMI also caps how far back the form will let you reach, describing entry for up to two quarters prior to the current quarter, which lands in roughly the same place depending on where in a quarter you played.

Our view: treat BMI's nine months as trivia and both societies as though the ASCAP rule applied. File on the Monday after the show. The entire value of this income is destroyed by a deadline nobody enforces against you except silently, and a quarterly habit costs ten minutes where a scramble in March costs a year of gigs.

They price a gig on opposite logic

This is the genuinely interesting difference, and almost nothing written about setlist submission mentions it.

ASCAP follows the dollar. It says the royalty generated by a live performance is based on the license fee the venue paid, and that because larger-capacity venues pay larger license fees, performances at those venues generate larger royalties. Your payout is a function of the room.

BMI pools. Its royalty policy manual and the BMI Live FAQ describe the rate per performance each quarter as a combination of the number of performances reported during the payment period and the general licensing fees available for distribution for BMI Live performances, varying quarter to quarter. Your payout is a function of the room only indirectly, and of how many other writers filed that quarter quite directly.

Both are defensible. They are not equivalent, and the consequence is concrete. At ASCAP, moving from a 200-capacity bar to a 900-capacity room should show up in the claim. At BMI, the same upgrade is diluted by every other songwriter who remembered to file. If you are weighing which society to join and live work is most of your output, this belongs in the decision, and it is not on either society's comparison material because neither frames it as a tradeoff.

What neither program will pay for

Both societies can only pay where they can license, and the exclusions overlap more than they differ. ASCAP grounds its list in 17 U.S.C. 110 and names musical theater, teaching activities, religious services, livestock and agricultural exhibits, government-sponsored events, private parties and non-permitted events.

BMI's published list is longer and worth reading before you log a month of shows:

• Digital livestreams and internet performances
• Weddings, birthday parties, anniversary parties and private house concerts
• Performances during religious services, though BMI notes that church events outside normal service times are eligible
• Face-to-face teaching at educational institutions, and performances to students in elementary schools
• Most cruise ship performances
• State or county fairs
• Performances in parks or public areas not authorized by city permit, which BMI says includes street performances
• Public domain music, including the national anthem at events
• Live classical, and live radio or television performances, each of which BMI routes to a separate distribution

The pattern underneath the lists is one rule: if the venue or event never needed a blanket license, your performance there generated no fee to divide. A house party is not a loophole, it is simply outside the system. Classical and symphonic work is not excluded either, just filed elsewhere, through ASCAP's Performance Notification rather than OnStage.

Report the covers

Both societies tell you to put cover songs on the setlist, and both are clear that you are not the one being paid for them. ASCAP's reason is a record: including a cover ensures ASCAP receives a record of all music performed. BMI says to add covers but that only cover songs already in the BMI Live database are eligible for payment under the program.

So the cover line on your claim pays the writers of that song, the way somebody else's claim pays you when they play yours. That is the entire mechanism, and it only works if people bother. Cover song royalties goes through the rest of what a cover does and does not owe.

Where we fit, which is nowhere

We should be straight about this one, because it cuts against the pitch. Davincii cannot file your setlists, and neither can any other publishing administrator. ASCAP requires the claim to come from a writer of the performed works. BMI says outright that publishers cannot submit setlists on behalf of their songwriters and that only performing songwriters may submit, while still paying the publisher side once the writer has filed.

That makes live claiming the one recurring piece of collection work an administration deal does not take off your desk. We register the works so that the titles on your setlist exist and match, we collect the publisher share the claim generates, and the filing itself stays yours. Anyone telling you they will handle your live performance royalties end to end is describing something the societies do not permit. Our pricing covers what the commission does pay for, and what publishing administration covers draws the same line across the rest of the job.

If you play out, put twenty minutes in the calendar for the first week of January, April, July and October, and clear the quarter's shows in one sitting. It is the highest hourly rate in your catalog admin, and it is the only royalty that disappears because you were busy.