Behind the music

What is a performing rights organization?

Music creators need to protect their work from misuse. Learn about the role that PROs play in the music industry.

Veröffentlicht am January 23, 2026

~8 Min. Lesezeit

Music is emotion. The right song can bring you to tears or move you to sing along at the top of your lungs. But it's also important to remember that music is also work: songs are written, composed, arranged, performed and produced by experts in their craft that deserve to be paid for their work. Performing rights organizations provide one of the pathways for musicians to generate income for their work.

The history of performing rights

The creation of the first performing rights organization stems from a disgruntled Parisian bar patron. One spring evening in 1847, a bartender at Café Morel refused the drink order of French lyricist Ernest Bourget. In protest, Bourget demanded that Café Morel stop all live music performances involving songs that he had written.

Bourget’s demand snowballed into a string of court appearances about how lyricists should receive compensation for the musical performances of their songs in cafés. Bourget eventually won his case and, later in 1851, co-founded the Société des auteurs, compositeurs et éditeurs de musique (Sacem), the world’s first performing rights organization.

Other early performing rights organizations include:

Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori in Italy (1882)
Vereniging Buma (now part of BumaStemra) in the Netherlands (1913)
American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers in the United States (1914)
The Performing Right Society (now PRS for Music) in the United Kingdom (1914)
Związek Autorów i Kompozytorów Scenicznych in Poland (1918)

What does a performing rights organization do?

A performing rights organization (PRO) is made up of members who hold the copyright for a particular artistic work. Broadly speaking, PROs protect the rights of their members by collecting royalties whenever a copyrighted work is used in a public place. PROs often focus only on musical works, but some also protect the copyrights of other artistic works like literature or visual art.

With music, a PRO typically collects licensing fees from entities (like restaurants, stores or offices) that wish to play the music. Licensing fees are structured in different ways depending on the country or even the PRO. A licensing enquiry form might include questions about the business type, opening hours, the size of the area where music will be played, the capacity of the space or whether the music will be played outdoors. Each variable can have an effect on the price that a business will ultimately pay to the PRO.

The PRO then distributes the royalty fees they collect. Two groups receive royalties from PROs: songwriters and publishers. Just as the name implies, the songwriter is the person who wrote the song and holds the copyright from the moment they create it. Many songwriters are signed to a deal with a record label or publishing company, which generally requires them to give up part of the ownership of their song. PROs give out royalties to songwriters and publishers using their own internal formula based on the reported usage of the music.

Why PROs matter for businesses

If the main job of a PRO is to protect the performing rights of their members, then that brings us to an important question: what is a public performance? A public performance is any instance where a piece of music is played in any public setting to a group of people that isn't just your friends or family.

The more common types of public performances of music are:

Playing music in a business via speakers (e.g., in a restaurant's dining area, in a hotel lobby)
Performing music in a live music venue (e.g., a band playing a song live on stage, a DJ playing a song during their set)
Transmitting music to an audience that might not be in the same place (e.g., playing music on a radio show)

These examples should make clear why PROs are important if you run a business: if your business uses music in the workplace, then your business needs to get a license from a PRO.

Many businesses make the mistake of playing music from a consumer music streaming service. But in reality, you can't play Spotify in your business: if you read the terms and conditions of the music app you use, you'll find that they're strictly for personal use.

How PRO licensing works in practice

To put it broadly, songwriters and composers sign up with a PRO and then add the songs they've created to the PRO's repertoire. In turn, PROs then give businesses that pay for licenses permission to play music from their repertoire.

In order to calculate their royalty payouts, PROs need to collect data that shows them how often specific songs were used. It's a complex process, as this data needs to reflect music usage from a wide variety of scenarios, including consumption reports for music streaming services, set lists for live music performances or broadcast logs from radio stations. Reporting music usage is an inexact science, which is why some PROs may estimate the number of playbacks based on a smaller sample size of venues.

PRO licensing is complex, as even a single song can have multiple songwriters, composers or publishers that each have partial ownership. This is why it's important for businesses to use a business music streaming service, as a good service should eliminate the possibility of playing music your business isn't licensed to use.

PROs vs. other rights organizations

Performing rights organizations are part of a much broader category of organizations that protect the interests of rights holders: collective management organizations (CMOs). Broadly speaking, a CMO is any entity that licenses the use of the intellectual property (and thus protects the various rights) of its members. What does it mean to 'use' intellectual property, exactly? It could include the right to copy the work (mechanical rights) or perform the work publicly (performance rights). A PRO might only focus on musical works, but there are many CMOs that also protect works of literature, photography, paintings, architecture or illustrations.

To add to the confusion, terminology varies from country to country. CMOs are sometimes referred to as collecting societies, which makes sense given that they collect royalty fees for their members. Some governments mandate a specific organization to handle copyright for multiple art forms, while others allow for multiple CMOs to coexist.

At Soundtrack, we handle music licensing differently depending on what country your business operates in. In Canada and the United States, Soundtrack works together with local PROs in order to include public performance rights in our plans. That means that Soundtrack users in Canada and the US just need to sign up and start playing music. In the rest of the world, Soundtrack plans include recording and publishing rights only; businesses need to get public performance licenses from their local PROs before using Soundtrack.

Performing rights organizations around the world

Copyright laws vary from place to place, which means that the rules that govern the public performance of music differ greatly between Bahrain and the Bahamas. In some countries, local laws dictate that only one PRO operates in the territory; in others, it is possible for multiple local PROs to coexist or even permit foreign PROs to manage rights.

The world of copyright laws is highly complex. There is a thick web of organizations that protect the performing rights of their members all over the world and it can be hard to make sense of them all. We tried to cut through the noise and compile a list of PROs in dozens of countries and territories worldwide.

Please note that the list below is not meant to be exhaustive.