This is one of the few decisions in music where doing nothing has a price and doing something does not. Affiliating as a songwriter costs zero dollars at both organisations you can actually join. Every month you put it off, performance royalties on your songs are being collected somewhere and not sent to you, because nobody knows your name.
What a PRO actually collects
A performing rights organisation collects money for the public performance of the composition — the song as written, not the recording of it. When your song plays on the radio, in a bar, on a television show, at a venue, or on a streaming service, a performance royalty is generated on the songwriting side. The PRO licenses those users, gathers the money, and pays the writers.
Notice the word composition. This is the part people get wrong, so it is worth stating flatly: your PRO does not collect your recording royalties and it does not collect your mechanicals. Those are two other organisations entirely, and signing up with a PRO does nothing about either of them.
What it costs, plainly
BMI: nothing to join as a songwriter or composer. No application fee, no annual dues.
ASCAP: nothing to join as a writer either.
SESAC: you cannot join. SESAC is invitation-only — it approaches writers it wants, and there is no application to fill in. If someone tells you they can get you into SESAC for a fee, that is the end of that conversation.
So the decision is between two organisations, not three, and neither of them charges you to walk in the door as a writer.
Where the actual money appears: the publisher side
Every song has a writer's share and a publisher's share. If you have no publisher, that publisher's share still exists — and if nobody claims it, it does not come to you. That is why writers are told to set up their own publishing entity and affiliate it too.
Here the two organisations are not the same at all. BMI charges a one-time fee to affiliate a publisher: $175 for an individual, $250 for a corporation or LLC, $500 for a partnership. It is not refundable and it is not recoupable against future earnings. ASCAP charges a one-time $50 processing fee for a publisher — and waives it if you join as a writer and a publisher at the same time.
Those are the published figures as of September 2026. Fee schedules move; read the join page before you sign anything.
The recommendation
Join ASCAP as a writer and a publisher in the same application. It is the only route on the table that gets you both halves of your song registered for nothing, and both halves is the point — a writer affiliation alone leaves half of every performance royalty unclaimed.
This is a narrow, practical recommendation, not a verdict on which organisation is better. BMI and ASCAP pay on broadly similar schedules, license broadly the same users, and the difference in what a working songwriter takes home is administrative rather than moral. If you already have co-writers at BMI, or a publisher who deals with BMI, follow them instead — co-writers split across two PROs is normal and causes nobody any trouble. You can only belong to one at a time, and leaving has a notice window, so read the term before you pick.
What you still have to do afterwards
Affiliating is step one of three, and the other two are also no-cost:
The MLC collects your mechanical royalties from US streaming — a different pot of money from performance, and one with a famously large pile of unclaimed cash sitting in it. SoundExchange collects digital performance royalties on the recording, which is the performer's and the rights owner's money, not the writer's.
Register with a PRO and skip those two and you have claimed roughly a third of what is yours.
None of this is legal advice — it is how the paperwork works, written by a songwriter, not a lawyer.
Registering costs an afternoon and nothing else. The money it collects has already been generated. You are not asking for anything — you are putting your name on something that is sitting there.
Three pages on this site that carry it further: the whole map of where to register, the unclaimed-royalty search, and how musicians came to be paid this way.
Do the Rest of the Registrations
A PRO is one of several places your name needs to be. The royalties and rights guide lists every registration that costs nothing, in the order worth doing them.