ASCAP Copyrights: Licenses, Fees, and Royalty Splits

ASCAP handles public performance rights and royalties for songwriters, composers, and music publishers by licensing the nondramatic public performance of songs in its repertory and then paying the money out to the people who wrote and published those songs. Businesses and platforms that play music buy a blanket license covering ASCAP’s full catalog of more than 20 million works; ASCAP keeps roughly 10% for operating expenses and splits the rest evenly between the writer and publisher of each performed song. In 2025, the organization collected $1.945 billion and distributed $1.759 billion in royalties to its more than 1.1 million members.¹

What the Public Performance Right Actually Is

Under 17 U.S.C. § 106(4), the copyright owner of a musical composition holds the exclusive right to perform that work publicly. A performance counts as public if it happens in a place open to the public, or anywhere a substantial number of people outside a normal circle of family and friends is gathered. Transmissions to the public are covered too, even when listeners are in different places or listening at different times.²

Individually licensing every song from every rights holder would be impossible for most businesses, so Congress has long permitted performing rights organizations like ASCAP to bundle those rights into a single “blanket license” that covers an entire repertory in one transaction.³

What an ASCAP License Covers, and What It Doesn’t

ASCAP’s authority is limited to the nondramatic public performance of musical compositions. Several adjacent rights fall outside its scope, and assuming otherwise is a common and expensive mistake:

Dramatic or “grand” rights, such as staging a musical, opera, or ballet, must be negotiated directly with the copyright owner.
Mechanical and synchronization rights, which cover recording music onto a physical or digital medium or pairing it with video, are not included. Mechanical rights for interactive streaming are now administered by the Mechanical Licensing Collective.
Print rights for sheet music and arrangements are separate.
Sound recording performance rights, which apply to the actual recording rather than the underlying song, are licensed separately, often through SoundExchange for digital transmissions.⁴

An ASCAP license also only clears the ASCAP repertory. BMI, SESAC, and Global Music Rights license their own separate catalogs, and a business that wants to play essentially any commercially available song generally needs a license from each of the four. Jukeboxes are the exception: ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC jointly operate the Jukebox License Office, which issues a combined license.⁴

Who Needs a License, and Who Doesn’t

Almost any business that plays music for customers is engaged in a public performance: bars, restaurants, retail stores, gyms, hotels, concert venues, websites, podcasts, streaming services, and mobile apps all fall under the rule. The Fairness in Music Licensing Act, codified at 17 U.S.C. § 110(5), carves out a narrow exemption for small businesses that merely retransmit licensed radio or television broadcasts. Restaurants and bars under 3,750 gross square feet, and other commercial establishments under 2,000 gross square feet, are exempt regardless of the equipment they use. Larger establishments can still qualify if they stay within strict equipment limits: no more than six loudspeakers for audio, or no more than four screens no larger than 55 inches and six speakers for audiovisual. The business cannot charge admission for the music and cannot retransmit the signal beyond its premises.⁵

The exemption covers only radio and TV retransmissions. Live music, CDs, and streaming services fall outside it, so a small café that meets the square-footage cap but plays Spotify through its speakers still needs a license.

Websites and apps that rely solely on embedded players from services like YouTube, Spotify, or SoundCloud generally do not need a separate ASCAP license, because those platforms carry their own agreements with ASCAP.⁶

How License Fees Are Calculated

ASCAP maintains more than 100 rate schedules, each tailored to a type of music use.⁴ For brick-and-mortar businesses, fees generally depend on how the music is presented (live or recorded, audio only or audiovisual) and the scale of the establishment. Relevant scale factors include seating capacity, ticket revenue, square footage, and number of employees.

For digital platforms, fees are driven by two variables: the number of annual sessions (a single continuous period of access) and the platform’s annual revenue, which includes advertising, sponsorships, and subscriptions. ASCAP states that its lowest-tier digital license starts at less than one dollar per day.⁶ The organization applies a principle that similarly situated users should be treated similarly, so fees do not vary by geographic location.⁴

How Royalties Are Split and Paid

After deducting operating expenses that currently run at about 10% of collections, ASCAP distributes the remainder to rights holders. Royalties are split 50% to the writer and 50% to the publisher of each performed song.¹ A writer who wants to collect the publisher’s share as well must register a publishing company with ASCAP.⁷

Distributions run monthly, on 12 cycles per year, and domestic royalties typically reach members six to nine months after the performance actually occurs.⁸ Writer membership is free, and so is a combined writer-and-publisher application; a publisher-only application carries a one-time, non-refundable $50 processing fee. To qualify as a writer member, an applicant must have written or co-written at least one musical work that is available to the public in some form, including live performance, streaming release, digital download, or sheet music. A writer can only belong to one U.S. performing rights organization at a time, though publishers may affiliate with multiple.⁹

How Performances Get Counted

ASCAP processes trillions of performances a year using a mix of census surveys (complete counts for media like network television and monitored radio) and sample surveys (representative slices where a full count is impractical). Tracking methods vary by medium:

Radio performances are identified through digital fingerprinting and station logs via Media Monitors. Members are encouraged to upload audio files to Mediabase so their songs can be recognized.
Streaming plays come from digital service providers such as Spotify and Apple Music, matched to ASCAP work IDs using metadata including ISRC codes, titles, and artist names. Works that don’t auto-match but accumulate significant plays are researched manually.
Television and film performances are logged from cue sheets submitted by production companies. Streaming audiovisual content is valued based on the number of views per performance period.
Live concert royalties come from quarterly surveys of top-grossing tours using Pollstar data. Performers at other licensed venues can submit setlists through ASCAP’s OnStage program.⁸

The Consent Decree That Shapes All of This

Since 1941, ASCAP has operated under a civil antitrust consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice designed to prevent anticompetitive effects from collective licensing. The decree requires ASCAP to offer a blanket license to any music user who requests one. When the parties cannot agree on a fee, either side may take the dispute to a “rate court” at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, which sets a reasonable rate by judicial determination.¹⁰ BMI operates under a parallel decree.

The decree was last formally amended in 2001. In August 2016, the DOJ’s Antitrust Division completed its most recent review and concluded that no modifications were warranted, while confirming the decree’s requirement that ASCAP offer “full-work” licenses. Under that rule, a licensee can perform an entire jointly owned song even if only one co-owner belongs to ASCAP.¹⁰

The Orrin G. Hatch–Bob Goodlatte Music Modernization Act, signed in 2018, adjusted several procedural pieces. Rate court cases are now randomly assigned to any judge in the Southern District of New York rather than routed to a single designated judge. The law also allows sound recording royalty rates to be introduced as evidence in rate proceedings involving most digital services, and it built in mandatory congressional oversight of any future DOJ effort to modify or terminate the decrees.¹¹

Rate court decisions have also drawn some hard lines around what counts as a public performance. In 2007, Judge William C. Conner held that downloading music from a server to a personal computer is a data transmission governed by mechanical rights, not a public performance requiring an ASCAP license. In 2009, Judge Denise Cote granted summary judgment to Verizon, holding that downloading ringtones and playing them on a cell phone was not a public performance under the Copyright Act.¹²

Looking Up Who Owns a Song

Anyone can search ASCAP’s ownership records for free. The ASCAP Clearance Express, or ACE, returns information on works in the ASCAP repertory, including aggregate share data, affiliated writers and publishers, and IPI identification numbers. ACE covers works that have appeared in domestic performance surveys, works registered since January 1991, and works under active licenses, and it is updated daily.¹³

Songview is a joint tool from ASCAP, BMI, GMR, and SESAC that reconciles ownership data across all four organizations for more than 38 million works, giving users a single view of who controls what percentage of a song’s public performance rights. When the data from participating PROs matches on writers, publishers, and share percentages, the work receives a “Songview checkmark” showing the information has been verified across organizations.¹⁴¹⁵ ASCAP also offers a search called ASCAP100% that identifies works controlled entirely by ASCAP members.¹³

A Note on AI-Generated Music

In October 2025, ASCAP, BMI, and SOCAN announced aligned registration policies: all three now accept registrations for works that combine AI-generated elements with human authorship, but works created entirely by AI remain ineligible for registration.¹⁶ That mirrors current U.S. copyright law, under which fully AI-generated works are not eligible for copyright because the Copyright Office requires human authorship.¹⁷ If a work isn’t eligible for copyright, there are no public performance rights for ASCAP to license or royalties to collect.

1
ASCAP. ASCAP Reports Record Revenue and Distributions for 2025
2
Cornell Law Institute. 17 U.S. Code § 106 – Exclusive Rights in Copyrighted Works
3
Indiana University Libraries. Music Copyright – Performance Rights
4
ASCAP. ASCAP Licensing FAQ
5
Cornell Law Institute. 17 U.S. Code § 110 – Limitations on Exclusive Rights
6
ASCAP. Website and Mobile App Licensing
7
ASCAP. ASCAP Help
8
ASCAP. Royalties and Payment
9
ASCAP. Music Creators
10
Department of Justice. Justice Department Completes Review of ASCAP and BMI Consent Decrees
11
Texas Association of Broadcasters. Music Modernization Act Summary
12
Open Casebook. US v. ASCAP (In Re Cellco Partnership), 663 F.Supp.2d 363 (SDNY 2009)
13
ASCAP. About ASCAP Repertory Search
14
ASCAP. Songview
15
BMI. Songview
16
ASCAP. ASCAP, BMI, and SOCAN Announce Aligned AI Registration Policies
17
ASCAP. Artificial Intelligence