Collecting Royalties Abroad: PROs and NROs Outside the US

The short version

Music earns money all over the world, not just where you live, and collecting it abroad works differently from collecting it at home. Most countries have their own performing rights organization (PRO) and their own neighboring rights body, and each collects within its borders. Your home registration does not automatically sweep up everything earned overseas. Getting paid worldwide means understanding how the foreign societies connect back to your home one, and where sub-publishers and specialist collectors fill the gaps. It gets complicated quickly, which is the honest headline.

Most countries have their own PRO

In the US the PROs are ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, and Global Music Rights. Cross a border and you find the local equivalent: PRS in the UK, GEMA in Germany, SACEM in France, and so on. Nearly every country has one. When your composition is performed in that country, on radio, in venues, on TV, or on streaming, it is that local PRO that collects the performance royalty there.

You affiliate with one PRO at home. Through a web of reciprocal agreements between societies, the foreign PROs collect on your behalf in their territories and pass the money back to your home PRO, which pays you. That is the theory. In practice, money can be delayed, reduced by a handling fee at each step, or simply not matched to you if your works are not registered cleanly everywhere they need to be.

Neighboring rights are collected more robustly abroad

Neighboring rights (performance royalties on the master recording, paid to performers and master owners) are where the gap between the US and the rest of the world is widest. In the US, neighboring rights are limited: they come mostly from digital and satellite radio, collected by SoundExchange as the neighboring rights organization (NRO), and ordinary AM/FM radio pays nothing on the master side. Many other countries pay neighboring rights on regular broadcast radio and public performance too, collected by bodies like PPL in the UK and Re:Sound in Canada.

That means a US performer can be owed meaningful neighboring rights money abroad that has no US equivalent, and it often goes uncollected because the artist never registered with the foreign systems. This is a big reason neighboring rights keep coming up as money people did not know they were owed.

How the money crosses borders

Two mechanisms move royalties internationally:

Reciprocal agreements. Collection societies sign deals to collect for each other's members. Your home PRO has agreements with foreign PROs, so in principle your overseas performance royalties flow home. The same idea applies between neighboring rights bodies.

Sub-publishers. On the composition side, a sub-publisher is a local partner in a foreign territory that registers your works there, collects what they earn, and remits to you or your publisher, taking a percentage for the service. Sub-publishers exist because local knowledge and local registration genuinely improve what gets collected. A songwriter earning real money abroad often ends up with sub-publishing arrangements, whether through their own publisher or an administrator.

Sub-publishers and collection societies, plainly

The pattern to remember: collecting worldwide is a network problem. Your royalties are generated in many places by many bodies, and getting them all home requires being registered and represented in those places. You can rely on reciprocal agreements through your home societies, use a publishing administrator that handles global collection, or set up sub-publishing in key territories. The more your music travels, the more this matters, and the more a professional (a publisher, an administrator, or a specialist collector) earns their percentage by capturing money you would otherwise miss.

What this means for an independent artist

You do not need to solve all of this on day one. But you should know it exists, because the default of register at home and hope leaves money uncollected. Start by registering your works cleanly with your home PRO and the MLC, register as a performer with your NRO (SoundExchange in the US), and as your music gains traction abroad, look into a publishing administrator or sub-publishing for the international composition royalties and a neighboring rights partner for the master side. The theme is the same as everywhere in music: you get paid when you are properly registered where the money is made.

How keysig helps

keysig does not collect royalties at home or abroad. What keysig does is keep the ownership documentation underneath clean: split sheets and agreements that record the correct splits, PRO and IPI details, and who owns each master. That is the exact information every foreign society, sub-publisher, and administrator needs to route money to you. Clean paperwork at the source is what makes worldwide collection possible, and it is the part keysig handles.