13 June 2026 · 7 min read

Registering your songs with a PRO: ISWC, IPI, and actually getting paid

There's money sitting in a pile somewhere with your name on it, and most independent songwriters never claim it. Every time your song gets played on the radio, streamed, or performed live — including by you, at your own gigs — it generates a performance royalty. Someone collects that money. The only question is whether it ends up with you or gets written off as "unidentified." This post is about making sure it's you.

It's not complicated once the acronyms stop swimming. Let's take them one at a time.

What a PRO actually is

A PRO — performing rights organization — is the body that licenses your songs to the people who play them in public and collects the money on your behalf. Venues, broadcasters, streaming services, and bars pay blanket licenses to the PRO; the PRO then distributes that pool to the writers and publishers whose works got played.

Which one you join depends on where you live:

• STIM (Sweden), PRS (UK), GEMA (Germany), SACEM (France), SOCAN (Canada)
• ASCAP, BMI, and the newer SESAC / GMR in the US

You join one PRO in your home territory, and it has reciprocal agreements with the others — so a play in Berlin still finds its way back to you through your local org. You generally pick one. Joining is cheap or free for writers; some have a small one-time fee.

The catch: the PRO can only pay you for works it knows about. An unregistered song earns nothing, no matter how many times it's played. Registration is the whole game.

ISWC vs IPI — the two numbers that matter

This is where people get tangled, so here's the clean version.

An ISWC identifies the work — the composition itself. International Standard Musical Work Code, formatted like T-123.456.789-Z. One song, one ISWC, forever, no matter who records it or what release it lands on. It travels with the writing, not the recording. (If you're thinking of the code on a release — that's an ISRC, which identifies a specific recording. Different number, different job. The ISWC is the songwriting one.)

An IPI identifies a person or publisher — Interested Party Information. It's your individual ID as a songwriter, issued when you join your PRO. Your IPI is yours for life and stays the same across every song you write.

The easy way to remember it:

ISWC is the song's fingerprint. IPI is your fingerprint. Registering a work is the act of connecting your IPI to that song's ISWC, with a percentage attached.

That percentage is the part that decides who gets paid, so let's talk splits.

Writer roles and ownership splits

Most songs have more than one writer, and PROs care about two creative roles:

• Composer — wrote the music
• Lyricist (or author) — wrote the words

One person can be both. A song can have several of each. What the PRO needs from you is a set of splits — the percentages that add up to 100% across all writers. If you and a bandmate wrote a song together and agreed to share it evenly, that's 50/50. If one person brought a finished song and the other added a bridge, maybe it's 80/20. There's no "correct" split — only the one you all agreed to. Write it down before the song does well, not after.

A few things worth getting right early:

• Splits must total exactly 100%. PROs reject registrations that don't.
• Decide splits when the song is written, while everyone remembers who did what and nobody's emotionally invested in a hit.
• Keep the same splits everywhere — your PRO registration, any co-writer's PRO, and your own records should all match. Mismatches stall payments while the orgs reconcile.

If you don't have a publisher, you register as a self-published writer and collect the writer's share directly. That's completely normal for independent artists.

Reporting your live performances

Here's the part bands leave on the table most often: when you perform your own songs live, that's a public performance, and it earns a royalty too. But the PRO has no way of knowing what you played unless someone tells it. Most PROs let you submit a live performance report — a setlist tied to a date and venue — and they'll match it against the licenses they collected from those rooms.

To file one you need, per song performed:

• The date and venue of the show
• The work and its ISWC
• The writers, their splits, and their PRO affiliation

For a single show that's annoying but doable. For a touring band with a catalog, hand-assembling that from memory is exactly the kind of admin that never happens — which is how the money goes unclaimed.

Where ArtistHQ fits

This is the unglamorous record-keeping ArtistHQ is built to carry for you. On each song in your catalog, the Writers & splits section on the song detail page stores everything a PRO registration needs in one place: the ISWC work code, each writer with their composer/lyricist role and split %, plus their PRO affiliation (STIM, PRS, BMI, ASCAP, and so on) and IPI number. Fill it in once when you add the song to a release, and it's there for good.

The payoff comes at reporting time. Because your shows already carry a setlist, ArtistHQ can produce a royalty CSV from your performed setlists — one row per performance per writer, with the date, venue, work, ISWC, writer, split, and PRO already filled in. That's the document a live-performance report wants, generated from data you entered as part of running your shows rather than typed out by hand at year's end. (The export lives on the Plus and Pro tiers; storing the writer and split data is on every plan.)

None of this files the registration for you — your PRO still wants you to set up the work and submit reports through them. But it turns "I should really sort out my royalties someday" into a five-minute export.

For a fuller walkthrough of releases, the song catalog, and the royalty export, see Releases and royalties in the help center.

The short version

1. Join a PRO in your home territory — you get an IPI as a writer.
2. Register each work so it gets an ISWC, with writers and splits totaling 100%.
3. Keep splits consistent across every writer's PRO and your own records.
4. Report your live shows — your own gigs earn performance royalties too.

Do the registration once, keep the data clean, and the collecting mostly takes care of itself. The bands that get paid aren't the ones with the best lawyers — they're the ones who wrote the numbers down.