How to Register Unequal Splits Correctly with SOCAN vs ASCAP

What registering your splits actually means at a PRO

Registering means logging the work, its writers, their roles, and the agreed ownership percentages with whichever performing rights organization collects each writer's royalties. At ASCAP you do it through Member Access (Quick Registration or Guided Registration). At BMI it's BMI Online Services under Works Registration. At SOCAN you register online at socan.com or with a work registration form, entering writer and publisher names, roles, and percentage shares.

The single most important rule across all three: every co-writer registers from their own account, and the percentages have to match. If you claim 70% on your side and your co-writer registers your share as 60% on theirs, the numbers conflict and the society holds payment until it's resolved. Mismatched splits cause payment holds. So agree the numbers once, write them on the split sheet, and have everyone enter the identical figures.

One detail before you start: have everyone's IPI/CAE number ready. That's the unique identifier each writer's PRO assigns them, and it's what links a registration to the right royalty account. It belongs on the split sheet too.

Registering unequal splits at ASCAP and BMI

Enter your real ownership percentages in the writer share, and let the PRO's 50/50 writer-publisher convention handle the rest. Here's the part that trips people up: ASCAP divides every work's royalties evenly between writers and publishers at the PRO level. Writer splits total 50%, publisher splits total 50%, combined 100%. That 50/50 is ASCAP's internal accounting convention, separate from your legal ownership. Your unequal split lives inside the writer pool.

So say you and a co-writer agreed 70/30 on the composition. On ASCAP, that 70/30 is expressed within the writer share. The publisher share is its own 50% that ASCAP accounts for separately. You're not entering 70 and 30 as if they sum to 100 of the whole work. You're entering them as the split of the writer side. BMI works the same way through Works Registration, with the same details: title, writers, splits, ISRC, release info.

If you don't have a publisher, that publisher share doesn't vanish. Self-administering writers can register their own publishing or use a publishing administrator to collect it. The point for registration is that the writer percentages you enter are the writer percentages from your split sheet, separate from the whole-work figure.

How registering at SOCAN differs

SOCAN enforces a 50/50 Rule that ASCAP and BMI don't state the same way: a minimum of 50% of the total registered shares must go to the composition's writers, and publishers can't exceed 50%. So if you're registering a Canadian work, the writers as a group always hold at least half. You can split that writer half unequally between co-writers however you agreed. You just can't let the publisher side climb past 50%.

When you register at socan.com, you specify writer and publisher names, roles, and the agreed percentage shares. The unequal split between writers goes in directly, as long as the writer total stays at or above 50%.

There's one SOCAN behavior worth flagging hard, because it costs people money quietly.

What happens at SOCAN if a co-writer hasn't joined

If one co-writer hasn't joined SOCAN or an affiliated international PRO, you can still register the work and collect your own portion. SOCAN withholds the unregistered co-writer's share until they join SOCAN or a reciprocal affiliated society. So the work isn't blocked, but that co-writer's money sits unpaid until they sign up somewhere SOCAN recognizes.

That's the practical reason to confirm every collaborator's affiliation before release, not after. Chasing an unaffiliated co-writer to join a PRO months later, while their royalties accrue in limbo, is avoidable. Put the PRO affiliation on the split sheet for everyone, and if someone has none yet, that's your signal to get them registered.

SOCAN also handles disputes plainly. If share allocations are disputed, SOCAN suspends royalty payments once it's made aware of the conflict, pending resolution between the parties. If legal proceedings start, the royalties go into suspense. None of that is a penalty. It's the system protecting money it can't yet pay out cleanly.

A clean split sheet, with matching numbers entered on every writer's side, is what keeps you out of suspense in the first place. You can produce one in a couple of minutes with the royalty split sheet generator and hand each collaborator the exact figures to register.

Mechanical royalties register separately

PRO registration covers performance royalties. Mechanical royalties from streaming and downloads are a separate registration at a separate body, and skipping it leaves money on the table.

The MLC was designated by the US Copyright Office under the Music Modernization Act, signed into law October 11, 2018. Self-administered songwriters register works in the portal individually, by CWR file, or by bulk template upload, and the same matching-percentages rule applies: conflicting claims delay distribution.

CMRRA handles the Canadian side, licensing mechanicals for music reproduced in Canada across streaming, downloads, CDs, vinyl, and broadcast. When two parties claim percentages that total over 100%, CMRRA flags the work as a potential dispute, notifies the claimants, and gives them 10 business days to confirm or resolve, with extensions available on request. CMRRA then holds the disputed shares until the parties sort it out directly. CMRRA doesn't adjudicate. That's another argument for getting the split sheet signed before anyone registers anywhere.

When your co-writers are on different societies

Each writer registers on their own society's platform, with matching percentages, and the societies reconcile through their reciprocal relationships. If one of you is on ASCAP and the other on BMI, you each register your share from your own account. The PROs don't automatically communicate with each other, so there's no single submission that covers both writers. Same pattern across the border: a SOCAN writer and an ASCAP writer each register on their own side.

This is exactly why the percentages have to match to the decimal. With no automatic cross-talk, the only thing reconciling your two registrations is that they describe the same split. Enter different numbers and you've created a conflict that holds payment on a work nobody is actually fighting over. Agree once, write it down, register identically.