Answers/Royalties/What Is a Performance Royalty, and Who Collects It?

Royalties

What Is a Performance Royalty, and Who Collects It?

By Boboy Watson·Last verified September 1, 2026·Royalties

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A viewer left a comment under one of my videos telling me that SoundExchange collects your Spotify performance royalties. I nearly agreed with him, because for about three years that is exactly what I believed. It is wrong in an interesting way — wrong enough that if you act on it you will register with one organisation, wait, see nothing, and conclude the whole system is broken.

So this page does two things. It explains what a performance royalty is and who collects it, and then it takes the SoundExchange confusion apart properly, because that single mix-up costs independent artists more money than any other misunderstanding in music royalties.

What is a performance royalty?

A performance royalty is money owed when a musical composition is performed publicly. It comes from 17 U.S.C. 106(4), the exclusive right to perform a copyrighted musical work in public, and it is owed by whoever does the performing.

"Publicly" is broad and it is not limited to a stage. A radio station broadcasting your song performs it publicly. So does a television network, a Spotify stream, a coffee shop with a speaker, a gym, a hotel lobby, a supermarket, a covers band in a bar, and you playing your own song at your own show. Each of those is a performance of the composition, and each of them generates a royalty owed to the writers and publishers of that composition.

No business negotiates song by song. Instead they buy a blanket licence from a performing rights organisation, which grants them the right to perform anything in that organisation's repertoire for a flat annual fee. The performing rights organisation collects the licence fees, tracks or samples what was performed, and distributes the money to its affiliated writers and publishers.

The important structural fact is that the performance royalty sits on the composition, not the recording. It is the same copyright the mechanical royalty attaches to. Which means the person who wrote the song gets it, and the person who recorded the song gets nothing from it unless they are the same person — which, for a self-releasing artist, they usually are.

Who collects performance royalties in the United States?

Four organisations, and they are not interchangeable.

For an independent artist the real choice is ASCAP or BMI, because SESAC and GMR do not accept applications. You cannot decide to join GMR any more than you can decide to be invited to a wedding.

BMI's own FAQ is worth quoting on the publisher question, because it contradicts a lot of advice floating around: a new songwriter "will not need to set up a publishing company", and "Creating a publishing company will not mean that you receive more royalties." Forming a publisher entity is about giving the publisher half of your work a registered claimant, not about increasing the pot.

What is the difference between the writer share and the publisher share?

Every performance royalty on a composition splits into two halves that are claimed separately: the writer share and the publisher share, conventionally 50/50.

This is not an accounting convention inside one payment. ASCAP and BMI treat them as two distinct claims made by two distinct account holders. The writer share is paid to the registered songwriter. The publisher share is paid to the registered publisher of that work. Both halves exist on every song, always, including a song written entirely by one person who has never met a publisher.

The failure mode follows immediately. If you affiliate as a writer only and register your works with no publisher attached, ASCAP or BMI pays you the writer share and the publisher share does not roll over to you as a bonus. It is unclaimed. Depending on the organisation and the circumstances it may be held, or distributed by market share, but it is not sitting in your account waiting.

For a self-releasing artist the fix is to hold both accounts and register as both. At ASCAP, applied for on one application, that now costs nothing: ASCAP's join page says joining is free for writers, or if you join as a writer and publisher at the same time. Coming back for the publisher account on its own afterwards is $50 one-time. At BMI the writer affiliation is free and the publisher affiliation carries a one-time processing fee BMI no longer states an amount for. Those are the positions as of September 2026, and holding both accounts is the difference between collecting the whole royalty and half of it.

Is SoundExchange a PRO? No — here is the difference

This is the section the whole page exists for.

ASCAP, BMI, SESAC and GMR collect the public performance royalty on the composition. SoundExchange collects the digital performance royalty on the sound recording. They are two different royalties, created by two different sections of the Copyright Act, paid by different services, and requiring separate registrations. SoundExchange is not a performing rights organisation and it will never pay you a composition royalty.

Two rows in that table do most of the damage when people miss them.

The first is Does Spotify pay it. Spotify pays a composition performance royalty to ASCAP or BMI, and pays the recording royalty for that same stream to your distributor, and pays SoundExchange nothing, because SoundExchange only administers the statutory licence for non-interactive services. Registering with SoundExchange and then watching your Spotify count climb with no SoundExchange payment is not a broken registration. Spotify was never the source.

The second is the statute row. 106(4) and 114 are genuinely separate rights over separate works. A song has two copyrights — the composition and the recording — and the performance right behaves differently on each. On the composition, the performance right is broad and old and covers everything from a jukebox to a stadium. On the recording, the performance right in the United States exists only for digital audio transmissions, which is why SoundExchange money comes from the satellite and the internet and never from the FM dial.

What does terrestrial radio actually pay?

An AM or FM station in the United States buys blanket licences from ASCAP, BMI, SESAC and GMR, and that money reaches the songwriters and publishers of the songs it plays. The featured artist and the owner of the master are paid nothing for that broadcast.

This is a real and often-surprising gap in US law. A song played 500 times on a commercial FM station generates performance royalties for whoever wrote it and zero for whoever recorded it. Most other countries do grant a broadcast performance right in recordings, which is why foreign neighbouring rights income exists and why US artists frequently have money sitting overseas they have never collected.

For a self-releasing artist who wrote their own song, radio play still pays you — through your PRO, on the composition, as both writer and publisher.

Where does streaming performance money come from?

Interactive streaming generates a composition performance royalty because the stream is a public performance of the song. Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube all license that right from ASCAP, BMI, SESAC and GMR, and the money is distributed to writers and publishers on the usual quarterly cycle.

It is worth setting expectations here without inventing a figure. The composition performance royalty per stream is small — considerably smaller than the recording royalty your distributor collects from the same stream. Streaming performance income becomes meaningful through volume and through catalogue, not through one release. What makes it worth doing anyway is that the registration is one-time, the marginal effort per new song is a few minutes, and the same affiliation collects your radio, television, venue and live income, which are not small per performance at all.

A single television placement, a national ad, or steady rotation on a broadcast station can produce more performance royalty than a very large number of streams. That is why the PRO account matters even for an artist whose streaming numbers are modest.

What does a PRO not collect?

Being precise about the gaps is what stops people assuming they are covered.

• Mechanical royalties. ASCAP and BMI do not collect US mechanicals from on-demand streaming. The MLC does, free, under the Section 115 blanket licence created by the Music Modernization Act.
• Sound recording royalties from Spotify and Apple Music. Your distributor collects those.
• The digital performance royalty on your recordings. SoundExchange collects that, free, under 17 U.S.C. 114.
• Sync fees. Placing a song in a film, show, game or advertisement is a negotiated licence. Your PRO collects the performance royalty generated when that show is broadcast, which is a separate and later payment from the sync fee itself.
• Your copyright registration. That is a US Copyright Office filing — $45 for a Single Application, $65 for a Standard Application or a Group Registration of Works on an Album of Music, $85 for a Group Registration of Unpublished Works, as of August 2026.

Four collectors, four registrations, no substitutions. A performing rights organisation connects exactly one of the four.

How do you actually set this up?

The order matters, because each step produces an identifier the next step wants.

1. Affiliate as a writer with either ASCAP or BMI. Both are free for writers. Pick one and stay there — you cannot hold a writer affiliation at both for the same works. If you already know you want the publisher half too, take steps 1 and 3 on the same ASCAP application, because that combination is free and the two done separately are not.
2. Record your IPI number, the identifier your PRO assigns you. Every downstream registration asks for it, and getting it wrong is a leading cause of unmatched royalties.
3. Affiliate a publisher entity at the same organisation, so the publisher half has a claimant. At ASCAP this is free alongside the writer application and $50 one-time if you add it later; at BMI it is a one-time processing fee the application quotes rather than the website. Choose a publisher name nobody else is using — your PRO will reject a duplicate.
4. Register every released work, listing all co-writers, their affiliations, their IPI numbers and their shares. Shares must total 100% or the work sits in conflict.
5. Register the same works with The MLC, which is free and covers the mechanical side that your PRO does not touch.
6. Register with SoundExchange as both featured artist and sound recording owner, which is free and covers the recording side that your PRO does not touch.
7. Submit live performances through your PRO's setlist tool if you play shows, because live performance income at small venues is claim-driven rather than automatic.

Steps 1 through 4 are the performance royalty. Steps 5 and 6 are there because the single most expensive assumption in this whole area is that one registration covers everything, and it never does.

Everything here is written from the perspective of an artist who has set these accounts up for his own catalogue, not from a lawyer's. Membership fees and distribution rules change — confirm them with ASCAP, BMI and SoundExchange directly before you rely on them.