ASCAP & BMI Form Task Force

If you're a musician, chances are you've heard of ASCAP and/or BMI. If not, here's a quick refresher. (You should also check out our earlier blog post on Performing Rights Organizations, found here!) These two PROs are the main players in the United States who deal with collecting performance royalties. (These royalties are generated anytime your music is either streamed or played in public, in the most general sense.) If you are writing and/or performing music, you need to get yourself affiliated with one of these. BMI and ASCAP are not for-profit and are the two biggest organizations, whereas the smaller, invite-only, for-profit organization is SESAC. 

For the purposes of understanding this article, the most you need to know is that ASCAP and BMI are the two leaders in the United States PRO game. As of last Thursday, these two have joined forces to create a Task Force, with the intention of addressing fraudulent song registrations in their collective ecosystems. Since the boom of streaming and even more recently with the development of AI tools, (available to assist in every part of the song creation process), song registrations have been flooding both ASCAP and BMI, threatening to overwhelm either systems. Seeing as the music publishing world already has a much longer timeline than other aspects of the music industry, this Task Force is a big deal. Hopefully this new unity between the two organizations will help streamline work processes and eliminate bad actors from the publishing space. 

The creation of the Task Force builds on ASCAP and BMI's preexisting partnership: Songview. In December 2020 this highly detailed database was created, and it revolutionized the music publishing and licensing world! For years there has been a lack of transparency and clear data when it comes to writer's splits and publisher info. Until Songview! With these two megaliths coming together in partnership, they created a data resource that provides publishing info for more than 25 million copyrights. You can find everything you need by going to either ASCAP or BMI's websites and clicking the "Songview" link in the search bar. This technology is sophisticated enough to provide exact writer splits, in many cases. The fact that these two companies came together on this project is telling: BMI President and CEO Mike O'Neill noted, "When two companies that are fierce competitors come together on a project this ambitious to address a need identified by the marketplace, it says a lot about how important greater data transparency is to both of our organizations." Here at Organic, we are excited to see how Songview develops. 

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