ASCAP, BMI & SOCAN Announce New AI Music Registration Rules
Gary Whittaker
ASCAP, BMI & SOCAN Announce New AI Music Registration Rules
The three major performance rights organizations—ASCAP, BMI, and SOCAN—aligned their policies in 2025 to accept registrations for musical compositions that are partially generated using AI. Fully AI-generated compositions remain outside those registration policies.
Key Points from the Joint Statement
- ASCAP, BMI, and SOCAN accept registrations for works that combine human authorship with AI-generated musical content.
- The organizations distinguish those works from compositions created entirely by AI tools.
- Human contribution remains central to eligibility under these registration policies.
- The three organizations have also taken the position that copyrighted music should not be used to train generative AI systems without permission, compensation and credit.
What This Means for AI Music Creators
- Fully human-created: Register through the normal process.
- Human-created with AI assistance: Generally remains within the human-authored category when AI is being used as a tool rather than generating the protected composition itself.
- Human + partial AI generation: Can be eligible under the aligned ASCAP, BMI and SOCAN policies when the composition contains human-authored material alongside AI-generated musical content.
- Entirely AI-generated composition: Not eligible under the policies announced by these three organizations.
Disclosure and Documentation
Creators should keep a clear record of what they wrote, arranged or otherwise contributed themselves and what was generated by an AI system. That distinction matters not only for PRO registration, but also for copyright, distribution and later royalty disputes.
August 2026 Update: SOCAN Is Now Working on AI Attribution Infrastructure
SOCAN’s next AI-rights move goes beyond deciding whether a composition can be registered. In July 2026, SOCAN announced a collaboration with Canadian rights-technology company Musical AI focused on consent management, attribution and reporting for generative AI.
The goal is to explore technology that can identify how licensed musical works influence AI-generated outputs and produce reporting that could support licensing and compensation. Musical AI’s system separately evaluates influence connected to sound recordings and musical compositions, which is important because those are distinct rights.
This does not mean SOCAN members are automatically receiving a new AI royalty today. The initiative is infrastructure work: SOCAN and Musical AI are exploring how attribution data, opt-in consent and reporting could eventually help creators and publishers control AI uses and be compensated when their works contribute to generated outputs.
For Canadian creators, that changes the bigger question. Registration tells a rights organization what you own. Attribution technology could help establish when and how that work influenced an AI output. If licensing systems mature around that data, the two processes could eventually connect.
Practical Record-Keeping for Creators
If you use generative AI in your music workflow, save dated lyric drafts, session files, stems, prompt records, exports and notes identifying your human contribution. That documentation can help you explain authorship during registration and gives you a stronger evidence trail if future attribution or licensing systems require more detail about how a work was created.
What Has Not Changed
SOCAN’s Musical AI collaboration does not replace normal song registration, does not create ownership in an AI-generated work by itself, and does not guarantee payment simply because an AI system may have been influenced by a song. It is an effort to build the technical accountability layer that could make future consent, licensing and compensation more workable.
About Top Music Attorney (Miss Krystle)
Top Music Attorney is an entertainment law platform led by Krystle Delgado, a licensed attorney and independent artist. She educates creators on copyright law, royalties, and AI policy. For legal consultations or learning resources, visit topmusicattorney.com.
