What Happens to Music Royalties When You Die

Your songs outlive you by 70 years. What happens to music royalties when you die is therefore a question about plumbing rather than ownership: the copyright itself is durable, and the accounts that pay it are the fragile part. They do not transfer by themselves, and in one common case they stop paying the moment a society learns you have died.

The short version: copyright in a song you wrote after 1977 runs for your life plus 70 years, so the earnings continue. What does not continue is the payment routing. Neither ASCAP nor BMI accepts a beneficiary form, BMI freezes a dead affiliate's account until it has a signed agreement with verified heirs, and that process carries a $250 fee per account and can take the better part of a year. Meanwhile unclaimed money is on a clock: it escheats to a state, or at The MLC it gets redistributed to other publishers after three years.

The thing most people search for is a "death clause". The thing that actually costs estates money is quieter than a clause, and it is covered below.

The form that does not exist

Start with the assumption that needs correcting, because almost everyone holds it.

You can name a beneficiary on a bank account, a brokerage account, and a retirement plan. The money moves on production of a death certificate, and no court is involved. Songwriters reasonably assume their PRO works the same way.

It does not, at either American society, and both say so in writing.

BMI puts it in the first line of its estates page: "BMI is not authorized by law to accept beneficiary designations of an affiliate's royalty rights. Therefore, before royalties can be paid to an affiliate's successors or heirs, they must go through an identification and verification process to establish the proper recipients."

ASCAP reaches the same place by a slightly different route. Asked directly whether a member can designate a beneficiary, its legacy FAQ answers: "Due to potential conflicts and the current state of the law, ASCAP cannot accept beneficiary forms. In order to ensure your wishes are followed, you should include your ASCAP royalties in your estate planning."

So there is no form. There is only your will, your trust, and if you leave neither, your state's intestacy statute. ASCAP spells that out too: die without a will and "state laws of intestacy will dictate who receives your membership interest."

What happens the day the society finds out

BMI documents its process step by step, and the first step is the one worth knowing.

When BMI learns an affiliate has died, "the affiliate's account is frozen to protect the proceeds of the catalog. No money will be paid out thereafter until we enter into an agreement with the affiliate's estate representative or the affiliate's heirs."

Freezing is protective and it is the right call. It is also the start of a wait. Here is BMI's own timetable and price list, from the same page:

A songwriter who did the sensible thing and set up their own publishing company has two accounts, so the estate pays $500 before anyone reads a statement. The fee is due when the questionnaire goes in, and BMI is explicit that paying it "does not guarantee payment of royalties" until the lawful heirs are confirmed.

Here is our opinion, and we will not soften it. Charging a grieving family $250 per account to release money the society already owes the estate, taking six to nine months to do it, refusing to net the fee against the royalties being held, and then charging $1,000 if an heir wants to pass their share to a sibling afterwards, is indefensible. Verification is genuinely hard and genuinely necessary. The cost of it does not belong on the estate of the person whose songs generated the income, and a society that distributes to its members as a matter of course can absorb an administrative fee more easily than a family settling an estate.

ASCAP does not publish an equivalent fee schedule, and asks families to call Global Services to establish a successor. It does publish one limitation that matters for small catalogs: "Where royalties are minimal, ASCAP is not able to name many successors due to the administrative burden of distributing numerous small payments." Where that bites, ASCAP asks for authorization to pay one successor at a time rather than splitting a small check five ways. If your catalog earns modestly and you have several children, that is a conversation to have before it is theirs to have.

If there is a dispute between beneficiaries, both societies step back. ASCAP says it "must sit on the sidelines, holding royalty payments for eventual payment in accordance with the settlement or resolution of the dispute." A family argument does not pause the earnings. It pauses the payments, indefinitely.

The clock your family does not know is running

This is the part that actually loses money, and it is the reason the "death clause" framing sends people looking in the wrong place.

Unclaimed royalties do not wait forever. BMI describes escheat as the mechanism by which a company "is permitted by law to remove unclaimed funds from its books on a regular cycle (usually 3-5 years) by sending it to the state of the last known address of the payee." Once that happens, "royalties, once escheated, cannot be reclaimed by BMI." The heirs have to go to a state unclaimed property office and make a claim there instead.

There is a matching trap for a missing relative. If one verified heir cannot be found, BMI says that person's share "will escheat to the State of Delaware," BMI's state of incorporation, and it "is not available to be shared among the other heirs." The family cannot divide an absent sibling's share between themselves. It leaves.

The MLC runs a different clock to a different destination. Unmatched or unclaimed mechanical royalties from usage on or after January 1, 2021 are, by the MLC's own account, "held for a minimum of 3 years so we can work to find and pay the rightful owner." After that, "The MLC will distribute the remaining unmatched or unclaimed royalties to music publishers and self-administered songwriters using a market share/activity-based formula." A dead songwriter's unregistered mechanicals are not held in trust for the estate. After three years they are shared out among everybody else, in proportion to how big they already are. We wrote about that pool in what happens to unclaimed royalties.

Against those two clocks, BMI publishes the single most valuable sentence on the subject: "We will not escheat any money earned by a decedent's works if we have been contacted by at least one heir."

One heir. One contact. Not the executor, not probate, not the completed questionnaire. Someone in the family picking up the phone stops the escheat clock on the whole catalog while the rest gets sorted out. If you take one action from this page, that is it.

Copyright lasts longer than the paperwork

The underlying right is not the fragile part, which is worth saying plainly.

Section 302 of the Copyright Act gives a work created on or after January 1, 1978 a term of "the life of the author and 70 years after the author's death." For a co-written song the clock is even longer: subsection (b) measures a joint work from "the life of the last surviving author," plus 70 years from that death.

That detail catches people out on split sheets. If you wrote a song at 25 with a co-writer who is 19, the copyright in that song is tied to their lifespan, not yours, and your estate holds an interest in it for 70 years after they die. Two writers, one clock, and it is the younger one that sets it. Our songwriter splits agreement guide covers documenting shares in a way that still makes sense decades later, which is a different standard from one that makes sense this year.

So the asset is durable. The registration attached to it is what decays, and a registration decays fastest when the only person who could answer a question about it is gone.

The rights your will cannot give away

One more piece of copyright law overrides your wishes, and it surprises writers who have carefully drafted a will.

Section 203 lets an author terminate a transfer or license they granted on or after January 1, 1978, during a five-year window opening 35 years after the grant, on written notice served between two and ten years beforehand and recorded with the Copyright Office. It applies "notwithstanding any agreement to the contrary", which is the whole point of it: you cannot sign the right away in advance.

You also cannot will it away. Section 203(a)(2) sets out who owns the termination interest when the author is dead, and it does so without reference to the will. A surviving spouse owns the whole of it if there are no children or grandchildren; where there are, the spouse owns one-half and the children divide the other half, with the children of a dead child taking that child's place as a group and acting only by a majority of themselves. ASCAP's estate planning explainer walks families through the same rule and reaches the obvious conclusion: for these rights, the statute rather than the will is what governs.

Leave your catalog to a foundation, a friend, or a sibling, and the termination right still belongs to your spouse and children. Whether that is a feature or a problem depends entirely on your family, which is exactly why it is worth knowing before a lawyer drafts anything. Termination is also the long-horizon answer to a bad old deal, which we cover alongside exit terms in the sunset clause walkthrough.

About that death clause

The phrase people search for is "death clause", so let us deal with it honestly rather than pretending it is the main event.

Publishing and management agreements do sometimes address what happens when a writer dies: whether the term ends, whether the administrator keeps collecting, whether the estate can terminate. Those clauses are real and you should read yours, in the assignment and termination sections, where the language usually lives. If your agreement is with an administrator rather than a publisher, the practical question is the post-term collection window rather than anything labelled death.

But a clause is not what empties an estate. What empties an estate is a catalog that was never fully registered, held by someone who is no longer available to confirm a split, a legal name, or a co-writer's whereabouts, while an escheat cycle and a three-year MLC clock run in the background and nobody in the family knows the accounts exist.

Everything we do on the registration side is aimed at that first failure, long before it becomes an estate problem: works registered at the MLC and the PROs under legal names, with shares that total correctly and a publisher entity, ours is DVCI MUSIC, named on the work so the publisher half has somewhere to land. A catalog in that condition is one a family can inherit. A catalog held together by one person's memory is not. If the division between the two halves is new to you, start with publisher's share vs writer's share, and our terms are on the pricing page.

What to do while it is still easy

Six things, none of which need a lawyer except the one that does.

1. Write a will that names your music. There is no beneficiary form to fall back on. If you leave nothing, your state's intestacy law decides, and ASCAP and BMI will follow it rather than your intentions.
2. Tell one person where the accounts are. Society, account name, the email address the login uses, and the publisher entity if you have one. The escheat clock is stopped by contact, and contact requires somebody knowing who to contact. This is a note in a password manager, not an estate plan.
3. Register the catalog now, while you can answer questions about it. Every unregistered work is money on the MLC's three-year clock, and the person who knows the splits is the person who will not be there to confirm them. The MLC guide covers enrollment.
4. Check that your legal name, not your stage name, is on the registrations. Estates are settled on legal names. A catalog registered to a stage name is a matching problem handed to somebody grieving.
5. Make sure the publisher half is assigned. At ASCAP an unassigned publisher share is held rather than paid, which becomes an estate's problem as much as yours. See the ASCAP guide and the BMI guide for how each handles it.
6. Ask a lawyer about the termination right if your catalog has real value. Section 203 vests in your spouse and children whatever your will says, and planning around a rule is easier than discovering it.

None of this is morbid, and none of it is about you. Copyright already decided your songs will earn for 70 years after you are gone. The only open question is whether the people you meant to leave them to will be able to find the money, or whether a state treasury and a market share formula will get there first.