How to Register Old Songs With Your PRO: SOCAN vs ASCAP vs BMI
You can register old songs with a PRO at any age. No deadline exists. SOCAN (Canada), ASCAP, and BMI (US) all accept back catalog works whenever you get around to it. The catch: royalties run forward from your registration date, so performance money earned before you registered is mostly gone, with a couple of narrow exceptions.
I see this constantly. An artist who's been releasing for years finally signs up with their PRO, registers the old songs, and asks the obvious question: where's the money those songs already earned? Most of it is gone, and nobody warned them. That's what this guide exists to fix.
Treating your back catalog as an asset means closing the gaps that quietly bleed money, and the unregistered composition is one of the biggest. Your distributor pays you for streams on the recording side. It does not register your songs with SOCAN, ASCAP, or BMI for performance royalties. Those are separate, and until the work is registered and matched, the performance money piles up in an unmatched pool you can't reach.
This page covers the retroactive registration workflow: how to add old songs, the differences between the Canadian and US systems, and the small windows where you can still claim historical money. Registration itself is free for writers and there's no time limit on the songs you can add.
time limit on the age of works you can register
you can belong to at a time (all are exclusive)
SOCAN window to submit a live setlist after the show
writer membership fee at SOCAN, ASCAP, and BMI
Key takeaways
- No PRO has a time limit on registering old works. SOCAN, ASCAP, and BMI all accept compositions written years or decades ago.
- Royalties collect going forward from your registration date. Performance money earned before a work was registered and matched is generally not recoverable.
- Writer membership is free at all three. ASCAP publisher membership is a one-time $50, BMI publisher is $175 to $500 depending on entity type.
- You can only belong to one US PRO at a time. ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC are all exclusive, and so is SOCAN.
- Two narrow exceptions to the forward-only rule: ASCAP can credit up to one survey year of missed royalties via a Performance Claim, and SOCAN accepts live setlists within one year of the show.
- Canadian writers register with SOCAN, not a US PRO. SOCAN's reciprocal deals pull your US performance royalties home automatically.
- Registering a work needs the same fields everywhere: title, duration, writer splits, publisher info, and the ISRC if it's commercially released.
Can you register old songs with a PRO years after release?
Yes. There's no age limit on the songs you register. SOCAN, ASCAP, and BMI will all take a composition you wrote ten years ago the same as one you wrote last week. SOCAN says so plainly in its FAQ, and ASCAP's ACE database holds work records going back to January 1, 1991 for anything that's turned up in a performance survey.
So the registration door never closes. What does close is the money. Every one of these organizations collects royalties from the point your work is registered and matched to plays. They are not banking your earnings while you sit unregistered. The performances happened, the money got allocated, and because nothing pointed back to you, it went into an unmatched pool that gets redistributed to other rights holders over time.
This is the part that costs people
Registration is retroactive in the sense that you can add old works. It is not retroactive on the money. If your songs have been streaming and getting played for years with no PRO registration behind them, that historical performance income is, for the most part, already gone. Register now so the clock starts. Waiting another year just adds another year of loss.
Why your distributor never handled this for you
This trips up almost everyone, so it's worth being clear. Your distributor (DistroKid, TuneCore, CD Baby, whoever) puts your music on the stores and pays you the streaming royalties from the recording side of those plays. That's the master. It does not register your compositions with a PRO, and it does not collect your performance royalties.
Performance royalties pay the songwriter and publisher when your song gets played in public: radio, streaming, live, TV. They live on the composition, a completely separate copyright from the recording your distributor handles. A single stream can generate both, paid by different bodies. If you never registered the composition, the recording side has been paying out while the performance side sat unclaimed.
Some distributors sell publishing administration as a paid add-on that covers this. The core distribution product does not. Check what you're paying for before you assume it's handled.
SOCAN: how to register old songs in Canada
If you're Canadian, SOCAN is your PRO. It's the only performing rights organization in the country, and writer membership is free for songwriters, composers, lyricists, and producers. You register works online through the member portal at socan.com.
For each old song you'll need the title, the duration, the writer names with their splits, and publisher information. If you're self-published with no publisher listed, you keep the full writer's share. There's no payment for a work that sits unregistered, so the only move is to get them all in.
SOCAN also handles mechanical (reproduction) royalties since it absorbed SODRAC, but that's a separate membership. Being a performing rights member does not automatically enroll you for mechanicals. You either add SOCAN Reproduction Rights or affiliate your catalog with CMRRA. The full royalty stack (mechanicals, neighbouring rights, and how SOCAN pulls your US money home) is covered in the collecting royalties guide.
When the money actually shows up
SOCAN distributes domestic performance royalties quarterly, with roughly a 7 to 10 month lag between the performance and the payment. So even after you register, the first relevant statement is months out. A quiet first cycle isn't a sign something went wrong.
ASCAP vs BMI: registering old songs in the US
In the US you pick one PRO. ASCAP and BMI are the two big ones (SESAC is invite-only), and a songwriter can only belong to one at a time. Both let you register old works with no age limit. The differences worth knowing before you commit are the publisher fee and the retroactive policy.
| ASCAP | BMI | |
|---|---|---|
| Writer membership fee | Free | Free |
| Publisher membership fee | $50 one-time (waived if you join as writer and publisher together) | $175 individual, $250 corp/LLC, $500 partnership, one-time |
| Register old works | Yes, any age | Yes, any age |
| Retroactive royalties | Limited: up to one survey year via a Performance Claim | Generally none; late registration can forfeit past royalties |
| Exclusivity | One US PRO only | One US PRO only |
ASCAP work registration in Member Access needs the song title, the ISRC if it's commercially released, writer splits, publisher name and split, and the release date. BMI's flow is similar. Have your splits sorted before you start, because guessing and fixing later is how royalties get tangled.
BMI's own Royalty Policy Manual states that late registrations and cue sheets may cause royalties to be delayed or lost. That's the official version of the same warning: register the catalog now.
The narrow windows where you can still claim historical money
The forward-only rule has two real exceptions, and they're both narrow. Don't read them as a way to recover years of streaming income, because they aren't.
First, ASCAP. If surveyed performances of your music exist from before you registered, ASCAP can credit up to one survey year of missed royalties. You request it by sending a Message through your Member Access account and selecting the category Performance Claims. Worth noting: this comes from an industry guide, not ASCAP's own published help pages, so treat it as worth trying rather than a guaranteed credit. Open the claim and let ASCAP tell you what applies.
Second, SOCAN live performances. If you've played shows, SOCAN members can submit concert setlists and get paid on those performances, but you have to submit within one year of the show date through the member portal. SOCAN's published guidance is clear that in-person and livestream concerts must be filed within that one-year window, and late submissions aren't accepted. You may have seen a three-year figure floating around. That's CISAC's international standard, not SOCAN's actual member deadline.
If you tour, this one's free money
The SOCAN setlist window is the one piece of genuinely recoverable performance royalty in this whole picture, as long as you're inside a year of the show. Make filing setlists part of your post-show routine.
Get your splits and ISRCs straight before you register
Every PRO registration asks for the same backbone: title, duration, writer splits, publisher info, and the ISRC for commercially released recordings. If your back catalog has missing ISRCs or inconsistent writer credits, registering on top of that mess just hard-codes the errors into the PRO's records. Untangling them later is slow.
The order matters. Audit the catalog first, fix the metadata at the source, then register. A clean ISRC on every recording and an agreed split on every composition turns PRO registration from a guessing exercise into a copy-paste job.
This page covers the PRO side of treating your back catalog as an asset. The metadata audit, copyright registration, and re-releasing old music each get their own guide, and the catalog strategy pillar ties them together.
Frequently asked questions
Can I switch from BMI to ASCAP and bring my old songs with me?+
Yes, but it's a deliberate process with timing rules. You resign from your current PRO during its published termination window, then join the new one and re-register your catalog there. Check the resignation dates carefully. Miss the window and you're locked in for another term. Existing royalties already earned at the old PRO still get paid out to you under its rules.
What happens to performance royalties that piled up while my songs were unregistered?+
For non-live performances, they're generally gone. The money got allocated to an unmatched pool when the plays happened and, with no registration pointing to you, it gets redistributed over time. ASCAP's one-survey-year claim and SOCAN's one-year live setlist window are the only realistic ways to recover any of it, and both are narrow.
Should a Canadian songwriter ever register directly with ASCAP or BMI?+
No. Register with SOCAN. Its reciprocal agreements with more than 100 societies worldwide, including ASCAP and BMI, mean SOCAN collects your US performance royalties and remits them to you. Belonging to both SOCAN and a US PRO at the same time isn't permitted, and registering directly in the US just creates conflicts.
Does registering a song with my PRO also protect its copyright?+
No. These are two separate things. Your copyright exists automatically the moment a song is fixed in a reproducible form, in both Canada and the US. PRO registration is about collecting performance royalties. Official copyright registration (CIPO in Canada, the US Copyright Office in the States) is a separate, optional filing covered in the copyright registration guide.
How do I register a co-written old song where I'm not sure of the splits?+
Lock the splits down with your co-writers before you file. PROs route royalties based on the writer percentages you enter, and if two writers submit conflicting splits for the same work, the registration goes into dispute and payment stalls until it's resolved. A quick written agreement, signed off by everyone, saves months of back-and-forth later.
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