Performing Rights Organizations: How to Join a PRO

A performing rights organization — a PRO — is the body that collects money when your song is publicly performed. Every songwriter needs one, and the reason is mechanical rather than philosophical: without a PRO you have no IPI number, and without an IPI number there is no identifier on a registration that tells a society whose bank account the performance share belongs to.

This page covers what a PRO collects, what it does not, how to join one, and what happens to your money in the meantime.

Short answer: join ASCAP or BMI as a writer. Both are free to join as a writer, both issue you an IPI number, and that number is what makes your performance royalties routable. Which one you pick matters far less than joining at all.

What a PRO collects

A PRO collects performance royalties — money generated when a composition is played in public. Four main categories:

• Radio and broadcast TV — terrestrial radio, network and cable television.
• Public venues — bars, restaurants, gyms, retail stores, live rooms.
• Streaming, performance side — Spotify, Apple Music and the rest pay both a mechanical royalty and a performance royalty. The performance half routes through your PRO.
• Live performance — your own shows, and other people playing your songs.

What a PRO does not collect is just as important. It does not collect mechanical royalties, which in the US run through The MLC. It does not collect sync fees. It does not collect neighboring rights, which are a recording-side income stream entirely. Those are separate systems with separate registrations, and a PRO membership does nothing for any of them.

Why the IPI number is the part that matters

When you affiliate, your PRO issues you an IPI number — Interested Party Information, an identifier maintained internationally through CISAC. It is your permanent global ID as a songwriter. It follows you between societies. If you leave one PRO for another, the IPI stays the same.

Here is the part most songwriters do not find out until it costs them. A work registration names each writer and the share they own. If a writer has no society affiliation, the registration can still be filed and the writer can still be named — but their share has no destination. In our own filings, an unaffiliated writer comes back from the societies flagged as non-society, and the registration system refuses to route the share to them. The work is on file. The split is on file. The money accrues against a name that has no account behind it.

This is why a song can be perfectly registered and still pay you nothing on the performance side. It is not that the paperwork is wrong. It is that there is no account at the end of the pipe.

The US options

Three PROs operate in the United States, plus one newer entrant:

• ASCAP — open membership, free to join as a writer.
• BMI — open membership, free to join as a writer, and the largest of the two by writer count.
• SESAC — invitation only. You cannot apply.
• GMR — invitation only, and aimed at a small roster of established writers.

For a working independent songwriter, that list collapses to two real choices, and the honest answer is that the difference between them is smaller than the internet suggests. Both use a mix of census and sample data. Both pay quarterly with roughly a six-month lag. Both will issue your IPI within weeks. Arguments about which one pays better tend to compare writers with different catalogs, different play patterns, and different publisher setups, which is not a comparison at all.

The one genuine tiebreaker: if you already have regular co-writers, affiliating where they are removes a class of split-conflict headache, because cross-society registrations are where splits most often stall. Beyond that, pick one and move on.

Outside the US, your society is determined by where you live — PRS for Music in the UK, SOCAN in Canada, SACEM in France, GEMA in Germany, and so on. You join the one for your territory, not the one that sounds best.

How to join

1. Pick ASCAP or BMI. If you have frequent co-writers, match them. Otherwise either is fine.
2. Apply as a writer. The application is online and asks for identity and tax details. Writer affiliation is free at both.
3. Wait for your IPI. Approval typically takes a few weeks. Your IPI arrives with your welcome material and is visible in your member portal.
4. Add the IPI to your Davincii profile. This is the step that unlocks performance registration on everything in your catalog.
5. Decide on the publisher side separately. Every performance royalty splits into a writer half and a publisher half. Affiliating as a writer claims the writer half only. The publisher half sits unclaimed unless a publisher account is registered against your works — which is the single most common way independent songwriters lose money, and the thing a publishing administrator exists to fix.

What happens before you join

Not having a PRO does not put your catalog on hold. Mechanical royalties are a separate system with separate identifiers, and a mechanical registration does not require an IPI at all — only a confirmed legal name and a publisher on the filing. So the mechanical side of your catalog can be registered and collected while your PRO application is still pending.

The performance side is what waits. Works can be filed, but the share cannot be routed until the IPI exists. Once you add it, the registrations can carry it going forward.

That asymmetry is the practical argument for joining early rather than at the point where you notice money missing. Performance royalties are subject to claim windows, and a share that sat unrouted for years is a much harder conversation with a society than one that was correctly identified from the first registration.

Where Davincii fits

We register your works on both sides — mechanical and performance — and we handle the publisher half rather than leaving it unclaimed. What we cannot do is join a PRO on your behalf. Writer affiliation is a personal membership, tied to your identity and your tax details, and it has to come from you.

So the division of labour is simple. You join, and you give us the IPI. We do the registrations, the splits, the society correspondence, and the collection.

If you have already joined and just have not added your number yet, it takes about thirty seconds in your artist profile — and it retroactively unlocks the performance side of everything already in your catalog.