For Artists / Live Royalties Guide

Live Royalties Guide

Most artists never get paid for live shows. Here’s how to fix that.

Every time you play a licensed venue, your PRO collects a fee on your behalf. Most artists never claim it.

The uncomfortable truth: Your venue paid your PRO a licensing fee the night you played. That money is sitting in a pool right now, waiting to be claimed. It stays unclaimed until you submit your setlist — and most artists never do, so it gets redistributed to artists who did.

What are live performance royalties?

When you perform original songs at a licensed venue — a bar, club, concert hall, festival — that venue has paid a blanket license fee to your Performing Rights Organization. The PRO’s job is to collect those fees and distribute them back to the songwriters whose music was performed.

This is separate from streaming, mechanical, or sync royalties. Live performance royalties exist specifically because of the act of performing your songs in front of an audience in a licensed space.

The catch: your PRO has no way of knowing which songs you played unless you tell them. That’s what a setlist submission is.

How much can you earn?

Bar / Club

$2–6

per original song

Mid-size Venue

$5–18

per original song

Theatre / Hall

$28–100

per original song

Festival / Arena

$50–280

per original song

These are writer’s-share figures only. Self-published artists collect both writer and publisher share — effectively doubling these numbers.

The annual math: A bar artist playing 50 shows a year with 12 original songs per set could be sitting on $2,400–$3,600 in unclaimed live royalties every year. At festival pace, that climbs into the tens of thousands.

How to submit — by PRO

Every PRO has a slightly different process, but the core data is the same: your setlist, the venue, and the date. See the full step-by-step guide for every PRO →

SOCAN1 year

Log into memp.socan.com → Set Lists & Performances → Register New Set List. Add each song, attach to the performance, submit.

ASCAPSame quarter

BMI9 months

PRS1 year

What you need to submit

✓Venue name and address

✓Date of performance

✓Your setlist — every original song you performed

✓Your IPI/CAE number (find it in your PRO profile)

✓Co-writer splits for co-written songs

The problem most artists face

The submission process is straightforward once you know it. The real problem is remembering what you played. A 12-song set at 11pm after soundcheck and load-in is hard to reconstruct accurately the next morning.

That’s why most live royalties go unclaimed — not ignorance of the system, friction at the data-capture step.

Setlistr automates the capture step. It listens during your set, detects songs via audio fingerprinting, and builds your setlist automatically. After the show, you confirm in under 90 seconds — then the submission data is ready and formatted for your PRO.

Stop leaving royalties on stage

Setlistr captures your setlist automatically during the show. Free to start.

Start Free →

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