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Can I Register an AI Song With a PRO (BMI / ASCAP / PRS)?

Having registered hundreds of songs with PROs over the years, up until late 2025 the AI issue was a real gray zone that even the societies themselves could not give a clear answer to. Things changed on October 28, 2025, and if you’re sitting on a collection of Suno and Udio tracks wondering whether you can register an AI song with a PRO, you finally have an answer instead of forum discussions.

Here is the short version. Yes, you can register a partially AI-generated song, but no, you cannot register an AI-generated song in full with BMI, with ASCAP, with PRS, or SOCAN for that matter. All the major societies have now taken their stance on the issue, and that stance is the presence of human creative contribution. The rest of the article is devoted to where exactly this line is, how to register without penalties, and where common advice about this is flawed.

What Is a PRO Exactly, In One Minute?

PRO stands for performance rights organization – a body that collects the royalties whenever your composition is performed publicly, meaning radio play, TV broadcasts, live gigs, background music in retail, and the performance side of streaming. BMI and ASCAP are the two major societies in the US, PRS for Music is the one in the UK, and SOCAN operates in Canada.

The first thing that trips up almost every newcomer to the field of AI music creation is the following misconception, so let me clarify that right away. PROs collect the royalties on the composition, on the melody, harmony, and lyrics of your song, but not on the actual sound file of it. The money you receive from Spotify for streaming will come through your distributor regardless of whether you are registered with a PRO or not. In case your only plan is uploading the tracks to the streaming services and earning money from per-stream payouts, PRO registration is going to be a small addition, not a replacement. But still – it’s money you leave on the table if you do not join.

October 2025 Shift That Settled the Question

For roughly two years now, the AI creators were stuck in uncertainty. But ASCAP, BMI, and SOCAN announced on October 28, 2025 that all three societies will accept registrations of partially AI-generated works. You can find the official announcement of BMI on aligned AI registration policies on their website, and reading it will take you about five minutes. This is where everything else has its sources.

All three societies define the partially AI-generated work as a composition that is created with the help of the AI tools and combines elements of the AI-generated musical content with elements of human authorship. These works will now fall under the complete repertoire of the societies, meaning they will receive royalties just like any other registered song. According to the coverage of Music Business Worldwide of the announcement, the compositions that are generated entirely with the help of the AI tools remain ineligible for any of the societies.

Two things mentioned in this announcement need more attention than they usually receive. First, the societies stated that training data is a theft, not the fair use – and this tells you where the politics in these organizations is leaning to. Secondly, and most importantly, the guide to registering AI music with the PROs published by Dynamoi mentions that BMI has clarified that hybrid works are not paid differently from fully human songs. The same pool, the same rules, the same royalties apply.

Where the Line Between Partial and Fully AI Generated Exactly Is

This is the place where most articles gloss over the issue, but let me be concrete about it, since I’ve done the exact same call on my own works.

If you prompt a generator to create some music and upload it afterwards without any changes, this is a fully AI-generated work. It cannot be registered with the societies. Does not matter whether you spend hours polishing the prompt, and whether you pick the best of the forty generations of the prompt execution. Prompting and selection is not the authorship according to the current policy, and this is stated explicitly by US Copyright Office in its January 2025 report, which I will refer to later.

If you write the lyrics yourself and let the AI generate the music, or compose the chord progression and melody and let AI generate the arrangement ideas that you develop further, or if you take the AI-generated stems, rewrite and record over them – you are in the partially AI-generated category. Human contribution should be the creative input into the work itself, not administrative effort.

The uncomfortable middle ground is light editing. Removing the intro, adjusting the tempo, fading the outro. My personal opinion is – and it coincides with the analysis provided by Dynamoi – this tweaking probably does not pass the threshold. The creative authorship is still overwhelming the machine here. If your human contribution is the sort of effort that an intern can provide in ten minutes – don’t register it. Registering the work that you know does not qualify is not a loophole but the false registration, and societies are designing detection algorithms precisely for that.

The gut check I would recommend doing – could I sit down and explain, section by section, which creative decisions are mine? If the answer is a list of specific contributions, you register the work. If it is “well, I picked the good one” – don’t.

PRS Takes a More Rigid and Detailed Approach

The UK deserves its own section since PRS has published the most detailed policy of any society, and it works a little bit differently from the American ones.

PRS published its formal AI policy in October 2025, and the very foundation of this policy is UK copyright laws, where the concept of originality is legally bound with human author. The PRS for Music AI policy document explicitly states that the works generated entirely with the help of AI cannot be registered with PRS at all.

What PRS accepts is the works that it defines as AI Assisted Works, when the AI was used as an assistive tool in the human-led composition process, and the result passes the originality test. Now the detail that I find truly well-designed. According to the UK law, the music and the lyrics of the song are two separate copyrights, and PRS uses that separation in its registration system. According to the PRS guide on AI and music copyright, if your lyrics are AI-generated and you composed the music yourself, you register your ownership of the composition and declare the lyrics component as “AI” in the registration. The reverse applies if you wrote the words and the machine wrote the music. You claim what’s yours, you declare what isn’t, and the AI-generated portion of the work earns nothing.

If AI was purely assistive, say you used it to test an arrangement idea that you implemented yourself, or asked it to suggest a rhyme, PRS says that you register the work normally and do not have to notify PRS about anything.

And the enforcement is important. PRS applies penalties under Rule 3 and Rule 5 of its rule book for the knowingly false registration, and PRS stated explicitly that it’s developing systems to detect anomalies, including the suspiciously high registration volumes. Members are the sole responsible ones for the accuracy of their registrations, and PRS explicitly stated that only the court can decide on the sufficiency of human contribution to the work. Translation: the burden of proof lies with you, so keep the evidence, and I will mention that later in the workflow section.

None of these PRO policies comes out of nowhere. They reflect exactly the position of the copyright office in question, and the American position received its most detailed formulation in early 2025.

The US Copyright Office report series on AI published the part 2 on January 29, 2025, which was dedicated specifically to whether the AI outputs can be copyrighted. The conclusions, summarized well in Skadden’s analysis, is that human authorship remains the base of copyrightability, that works generated entirely by the AI cannot be copyrighted, and that prompts alone, no matter how detailed and how much effort went into their creation, do not make you the author of the work. In case the work combines the human contribution with the AI-generated elements, only human contributions are protected, and using AI as a tool in the human creative process does not affect the rest of the work.

Since 2023, the US Copyright Office also demands the disclosure. If the registered work contains some amount of AI-generated material, you must declare it in the registration form and briefly state your contributions. Not providing this information can lead to cancellation of your registration afterwards, which is worse outcome than being honest upfront.

This is why the PRO policies look like that. PRO licenses the copyrights, and if there is no copyright since there is no human author, there is nothing for the society to license. This is the fraud scenario that every society is trying to prevent.

Read Your AI Generator’s Terms Before You Register Anything

Here comes the step that almost nobody thinks about, but it can burn people bad. Before you think about the registration with the PRO, you must understand what rights do you have from your AI tool, since those terms have been changing under the feet of many people already.

Suno is the major one. According to Suno’s own knowledge base on the topic of song ownership, songs generated with the free Basic plan belong to Suno, and can only be used non-commercially. Pro and Premier subscribers of the platform get the commercial use rights of songs generated while they are subscribed, and these rights persist even in case they canceled their subscriptions. But notice the wording, since it has changed. After the settlement and partnership deal with Warner Music Group in November 2025, as reported by Music In Africa on Suno’s adjusted ownership terms, the company has silently changed its wording so that even with the commercial rights granted, the user is generally not considered the owner of the output since it is generated by Suno. You hold the license to exploit the track, but not the authorship of it.

That distinction is very important for the PRO registration. When you register the work with BMI or ASCAP, you register the human authorship of the composition, your lyrics, melodies, and your structural writing. The terms of Suno may allow you to use the generated track commercially, but they cannot manufacture the human authorship where there is none. Two systems are answering different questions.

Udio terms historically are even stricter, restricting the usage of the output generated with Udio to the personal and non-commercial use under general terms of service. And over both platforms looms the record industry lawsuit filed in June 2024 seeking the statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work due to the training data. Warner settled the case with Suno for the reported $500 million in November 2025, but the cases against other majors are still pending. Neither of the platforms indemnify ordinary users from that liability. I’m not saying this to scare you off – I use both tools myself. I’m saying that you should build your commercial plans on the pieces you created.

How Would I Register a Hybrid Song, Step by Step

Assuming that you have a track with a real human authorship in it, let’s say your lyrics over the AI-generated music that you then arranged and edited. Here comes my workflow.

First, document the process while you’re working on it, not after. Keep your lyric drafts with timestamps, voice memos of melodies, project files, prompt histories, and records of the changes you made. PRS explicitly expects its members to be able to provide evidence of their contribution in case they will be challenged, and there is no cost to maintaining the folder per track.

Second, join the society if you haven’t done it yet. If you are in the US, you are going to choose either BMI or ASCAP, since dual membership in the same society is not allowed. According to the Orphiq’s practical guide to comparing ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC, ASCAP charges the one-time $50 registration fee, while BMI membership for songwriters is free. Beyond that the differences are marginal for most writers. BMI charges the publishers $150 for individual and $250 for corporate members, ASCAP’s contract period is one year, while BMI’s is two, and both use similar formulas to payout royalties. SESAC is the invite-only society, so there is no decision to make, only invitation to accept. If you are in the UK, you are going to join PRS. There is no need to think much about this decision – I have always chosen the free option in my career, and I have never regretted the fifty dollars saved.

Third, register the work honestly. Provide the names of the human writers and splits, and in case there is the field in your society’s portal where the AI involvement is asked, answer the truthfully. In case of PRS, declare the AI generated component of the work as “AI” in the registration. In case of BMI and ASCAP, register the work as a partially AI-generated composition in accordance with the October 2025 policy, and fill the disclosure fields however society’s portal suggests you to do that, since the societies have made it explicitly clear that this is the expected practice now. Making guesses at the splits or hiding the AI contribution in order to make the registration look nicer is exactly what the new detection systems are looking for.

Fourth, register your copyright in case you are in the US and this track is important to you commercially. The copyright registration with the US Copyright Office will cost you a modest fee, will require you to fill the AI disclosure I mentioned previously, and will give you the right to sue in case of copyright infringement. PRO registration is not a copyright registration, another thing people constantly confuse.

Fifth, make sure that your metadata is consistent. The writer names, song titles, and splits on the PRO registration should coincide with your distributor, copyright registration, and publishing administration service if you use it. Mismatched metadata is the single most boring and most common reason for missing royalties.

The Honest Money Discussion

Let me set the expectations here, because I think that the AI music content industry oversells this aspect of it.

Performance royalties are the real money you can get for the songs that are performed publicly. For the typical track generated with the help of the AI and sitting on the Spotify with several thousands of plays, the performance royalty portion is quite modest, usually just a handful of dollars per year. Dynamoi analysis I quoted before makes the same point: for most AI music creators, the PRO royalties are the minor income line next to the streaming royalties coming through distributors. You are still registering the track in order to get the small additional income line from PRO and because it’s nearly free of cost, and it’s cumulative for the entire catalog, and because you cannot claim royalties retroactively for the period before the registration if your track takes off or gets synced somewhere.

There is the defensive reason to do that as well. Streaming platforms are purging low-effort AI tracks on a scale that is hard to underestimate. According to the Spotify’s own announcement of strengthened AI protections, over 75 million spammy tracks were purged in the twelve months before September 2025, along with the new spam filter, the impersonation crackdown, and AI labeling standard adopted by the industry. Spotify has been very careful to stress that AI music itself is not banned, the target is the bulk uploaded junk and the royalty fraud. The track registered with the PRO with declared human authors, clean metadata, and the AI declaration looks like the proper end of the market. Anonymous bulk uploads of the prompt-generated tracks look like the opposite end, and the platforms get better at distinguishing the two.

Questions You Need to Answer Before Hitting “Register”

Did I write the lyrics, the melody, or both? If yes – you probably have the registrable human authorship in either component, and at PRS you register your component and declare the other as “AI”.

Was my role limited to the prompting, generating, and selecting? Then your work is the fully AI-generated work under every current policy and you should not register it. Release it if the terms of your generator allow, enjoy it, but it earns no performance royalties since legally there is no composition to register.

Can I prove my contribution with drafts, project files, or recordings? If not – start documenting that now, since the burden of proof is on you in case of a challenge to the registration.

Does my AI generator’s plan actually allow commercial use? The output of the free-tier Suno cannot be monetized at all according to the current copyright laws, which makes this registration question moot.

Am I tempted to make anything but the honest answer to any of these questions? This is the signal that you should stop. PRS has explicitly announced the penalty for the knowingly false registration, American societies reject the fully AI-generated works altogether, and cancelled registration and terminated membership cost much more than the royalties you skim.

What I Would Do This Week

In case you are generating the music with the help of the AI and are not a PRO member yet, pick your society and register, it will take you fifteen minutes and cost nothing or fifty dollars. Then go through your catalog and divide the tracks into three categories: fully AI-generated, genuinely hybrid, and fully human. Register the second and third categories with the correct declarations about the AI in them, document the process for every future track, and read the current terms of your AI generator, since as the Suno case proves, the terms are changing without much warning.

The era of guessing whether you can register the AI song with the PRO is over. Societies made it clear where they stand – human creativity gets registered and paid, machine output does not, and honesty about which is which is now the requirement, not the courtesy. Work with that grain instead of against it, and your AI-assisted catalog will now sit in the same royalty system as everything else you’ll write.

Sources

Common questions

Can I register a Suno or Udio song with BMI or ASCAP?

Only if you contributed real human authorship to the composition, such as writing the lyrics, composing the melody or chord progression, or rewriting and recording over the AI stems. A track you prompted, generated and uploaded without changes is fully AI generated and is not eligible with any society, no matter how much time went into the prompt or how many generations you picked from.

What counts as a partially AI generated song?

All three North American societies define it as a composition created with AI tools that combines AI generated musical content with elements of human authorship. Writing your own lyrics over AI music, composing a melody that AI arranges, or taking AI stems and substantially reworking them all qualify. Light edits like trimming the intro, adjusting tempo or fading the outro probably do not pass the threshold.

Does PRS accept AI generated music?

PRS accepts what it calls AI Assisted Works, where AI was an assistive tool in a human led process and the result passes the originality test, but not works generated entirely by AI. Because UK law treats music and lyrics as separate copyrights, you register the component you wrote and declare the other as "AI," and the AI portion earns nothing. If AI was purely assistive, such as suggesting a rhyme, you register normally with no declaration.

Do AI assisted songs get paid less by PROs?

No. BMI has clarified that hybrid works are paid from the same pool under the same rules as fully human songs. Only the fully AI generated works are excluded, and at PRS the declared AI component of a hybrid work does not earn royalties.

What happens if I register a fully AI generated song as my own?

That is a false registration rather than a loophole. PRS applies penalties under Rule 3 and Rule 5 of its rule book for knowingly false registrations and is building systems to detect anomalies like suspiciously high registration volumes, while the American societies reject fully AI works outright. A cancelled registration or terminated membership costs far more than any royalties you might collect.

Does Suno let me own the songs I make?

Not in the way most people assume. Songs made on the free Basic plan belong to Suno and are non commercial only. Pro and Premier subscribers get commercial use rights that survive cancellation, but after the November 2025 Warner Music deal Suno's wording changed so users hold a licence to exploit the output rather than authorship of it. Commercial rights from a generator cannot create the human authorship a PRO registration requires.

Is PRO registration the same as copyright registration?

No, and people confuse them constantly. A PRO collects performance royalties on the composition when it is played on radio, TV, in venues or on the performance side of streaming. Copyright registration with the US Copyright Office is separate, costs a modest fee, requires an AI disclosure, and gives you the right to sue for infringement. Streaming payouts come through your distributor regardless of either.

How much does it cost to join BMI, ASCAP or PRS?

BMI membership for songwriters is free, ASCAP charges a one time $50 fee, and BMI charges publishers $150 for individual and $250 for corporate members. ASCAP's contract runs one year and BMI's two, and you cannot belong to both. SESAC is invite only. In the UK you join PRS.

How do I prove my human contribution to an AI assisted song?

Document the process while you work rather than afterwards. Keep timestamped lyric drafts, voice memos of melodies, project files, prompt histories and records of your edits in a folder per track. PRS expects members to provide evidence if challenged and says only a court can decide whether human contribution is sufficient, so the burden of proof sits with you.

Is it worth registering AI assisted songs with a PRO?

Yes, though the income is modest. For a typical track with a few thousand streams the performance royalty is usually a handful of dollars a year, but registration costs nothing or $50, accumulates across your whole catalog, and you cannot claim royalties retroactively if a track later takes off or gets synced. It also signals legitimacy at a time when Spotify purged over 75 million spammy tracks in a year and platforms are getting better at separating declared hybrid works from anonymous bulk uploads.