Glossary · The business around it
Performance rights organisation
A performance rights organisation collects royalties when your music is publicly performed, including on radio. In the United States these are ASCAP, BMI and SESAC. Joining is only half of it: you also have to register each work, or a broadcast play generates nothing for you.
Radio play is a performance, and performances generate royalties for the songwriting side of a record. Those royalties are collected and distributed by the PRO, matched against station logs. If the work is unregistered, or registered with the wrong splits, the money has nowhere to go even though the play happened.
For an independent artist doing their own admin, this is the least glamorous and most neglected piece of getting played. It costs an evening. Sorting it out before a campaign rather than after means the plays you work for are actually counted.
Pick your sound and region on Rotation and each of these stations shows its real submission contact and the exact rules it posts: clean edit, WAV, form or mail. Checked by hand and kept current. No station here paid to be listed.
Open my sheet →If you have been played before, some of it may already be owed to you. Airplay and streams generate money that is only paid out if somebody claims it, and the pools do not chase you. The Hidden Doors walks six searches you run on your own name, then lists 59 verified routes to money artists never collect. $19, and the radio registry stays free. What is in it →
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