Public Performance Royalties
Your song plays on the radio every week. The PRO check never arrives.
Public performance royalties are payments generated whenever your composition is performed in public: broadcast on radio or TV, streamed on services like Spotify and Apple Music, or played as background music in a café, bar, hotel lobby, or gym. They are collected by Performing Rights Organisations (PROs) around the world and paid only to registered members — you don't need to be a signed artist, just a member.
Most artists register with their home country's PRO and forget the rest. But performance royalties are territorial: a UK play and a Dutch play generate separate royalties, collected by separate societies. Without representation in each territory, those earnings pool in the "black box" and are distributed to other registered rights holders. Foreign performance income is the single largest source of uncollected royalties for international artists.
The other five royalty types
Find out if you're actually collecting public performance royalties.
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