Breaking Into The Music Industry: Performance Rights Organizations

The owner of a copyright in a protected musical composition may use the work as (s)he wishes; conversely, (s)he may prevent others from using that work without authorization. Whenever a musical work ("song") is being performed for commercial purposes, that owner should almost always expect to receive a royalty.

Making individual efforts to collect royalties, however, require hours of investigation and paperwork - tracking how many times the song has been played, determining whether it was performed on TV, in a film, on the radio or Internet, or calculating which percentage of the royalty goes to which owner (if the song has co-composers). This is where it makes sense to become a member of a Performance Rights Organization ("PRO"). The purpose of these organizations is to track the "public performance" of musical compositions (anything from elevator-music to radio play to live band concerts), collect license fees for copyright owners who are PRO members, and distribute royalties to their members.

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