The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers collects licensing fees from users of music created by ASCAP members, then distributes them back to its members as royalties. In effect, the arrangement is the product of a compromise: when a song is played, the user does not have to pay the copyright holder directly, nor does the music creator have to bill a radio station for use of a song.

In 2019, ASCAP collected over US$1.274 billion in revenue and distributed $1.184 billion in royalties to its members. As of September 2020, ASCAP membership included over 775,000 songwriters, composers and music publishers, with over 11 million registered works.

ASCAP was founded by Victor Herbert, together with composers George Botsford, Silvio Hein, Irving Berlin, Louis Hirsch, John Raymond Hubbell and Gustave Kerker, Millard Fillmore, lyricist Glen MacDonough, publishers George Maxwell (who served as its first president) and Jay Witmark and copyright attorney Nathan Burkan at the Hotel Claridge in New York City on February 13, 1914, to protect the copyrighted musical compositions of its members, who were mostly writers and publishers associated with New York City's Tin Pan Alley. ASCAP's earliest members included the era's most active songwriters—George M. Cohan, Rudolf Friml, Otto Harbach, Jerome Kern, John Philip Sousa, Alfred Baldwin Sloane, James Weldon Johnson, Robert Hood Bowers and Harry Tierney. Subsequently, many other prominent songwriters became members.


[Post edited by PhotoHokieNC at 02/13/2022 06:41AM]