Your notice of resignation must be submitted using the Member Access portal, available at www.ascap.com/members. Click the Profile → Membership Status section. If you are within your annual notification window, you will see a button to begin the resignation process. If you do not see the button, your annual notification window is not yet open.

If you cannot access the internet, please contact ASCAP Global Services at 1-800-95-ASCAP.

There is an annual three-month window based on your date of election to ASCAP membership, during which you must notify ASCAP of your intention to resign. If you miss this window, you will have to wait for your window to open again the following year.

Your personalized notification window is also listed in Member Access, under the Profile → Membership Status section.

Please note that if you notify ASCAP of your intention to resign within the proper window, your resignation will take effect on the Resignation Effective Date – also listed in Member Access.

Upon notification of your intent to resign, you must select how you would like ASCAP to treat your then-existing ASCAP catalog (i.e., any of your musical works licensed by ASCAP during your membership, including music you write on or before your Resignation Effective Date). You have two options:

1. You can choose to have ASCAP continue to license your works already in ASCAP’s repertory.

   This is the most common option for resigning members. For all works that you wrote during your membership term or were otherwise licensed by ASCAP before your Resignation Effective Date, we will continue to license these works (including for new licenses entered into after your Resignation Effective Date), and you will continue to receive domestic ASCAP royalties for these works in the same manner as if you were a current ASCAP member. Any works you write after your Resignation Effective Date will not be licensed by ASCAP.

2. You can choose to remove your existing catalog of works from ASCAP, and switch them to your new PRO.

   You may decide to request removal of your existing ASCAP catalog to your new PRO. Keep in mind that your works may not be able to be removed at the same time as your Resignation Effective Date, because both the writer and corresponding ASCAP publisher shares associated with your interest in the work must be removed before ASCAP can accept the work removal. Additionally, upon the effective date of the work removal, the removed works will remain subject to any ASCAP Licenses-in-Effect (discussed below).

A “License-in-Effect” is any license agreement between ASCAP and a music user that is signed and final at the time of your Resignation Effective Date. ASCAP’s licenses generally include a provision that assures the licensee that it may continue to publicly perform the musical works that are in ASCAP’s Repertory until the term of that license expires. In exchange, ASCAP receives consistent payment from the licensees and our members will be paid royalties accordingly.

Once your works are removed from the ASCAP repertory, ASCAP will continue to pay you domestic royalties attributable to performances under Licenses-in-Effect, until those licenses expire. ASCAP will not pay you domestic royalties from any other sources.

On or right after your Resignation Effective Date, ASCAP will update the international Interested Party Information (IPI) database to reflect that we no longer represent you as a writer, as of your resignation date. It is then the obligation of your new PRO to update the IPI following ASCAP’s release.

Keep in mind, distributions from foreign societies are generally paid to the society that is currently claiming the writer – even if we continue to license the writer’s ASCAP catalog in the US. This means that ASCAP no longer has the authority to collect your royalties for performances outside the US.

It is therefore possible that significant income could be missed by a writer (or publisher) if your new PRO doesn’t immediately inform SUISA (the Swiss PRO that administers the IPI database) of your new PRO affiliation. We encourage you to avoid any gap between your resignation with ASCAP and affiliation with another PRO, to avoid losing out on any income. Make sure to keep in contact with your new PRO about updating the IPI database as soon as your ASCAP Resignation Effective Date has passed and you confirm that you are affiliated with your new PRO.

If for whatever reason – affiliation gaps, distribution delays, etc. – ASCAP receives payments from a foreign PRO after you have resigned, we will distribute those royalties to you on the same basis as a current ASCAP member.

The writer’s share and publisher’s share of the same interest in a work are two parts of an inseparable whole.* Accordingly, neither interest can be removed from the ASCAP repertory unless both interests are removed (i.e., you cannot “split” a writer’s share and a publisher’s share).

If you are a self-published writer member of ASCAP (i.e., if you do not have a co-publishing deal with another ASCAP publishing entity), you must:

1. Resign your writer membership from ASCAP, and request to remove the works in your writer catalog, via Member Access.
2. Resign your publishing company from ASCAP, and request to remove the same works, via Member Access.

Because your works’ removal is dependent on your co-publishers submitting a Publisher Works Removal Form on the anniversary of its Resignation Effective Date, it is quite possible that portions of your catalog may be removed at different times (or not at all). We encourage you to consult with your publishers before and after your resignation.

If you choose to keep all (or a portion) of your existing ASCAP catalog in our repertory, any work remaining at ASCAP which would normally qualify for a bonus (e.g., an Audio Feature Premium, Classic Songs Bonus or TV Premium) will still receive a bonus, just as if you were still an ASCAP member.

Based on current ASCAP Survey and Distribution Rules & Policies, if you remove your works, bonus payments for those removed works may be affected by the removal as follows:

• TV Premium and Classic Songs Bonus: These payments will be paid at the same rates as usual until the expiration of the applicable Licenses-in-Effect. After the license expires, you will no longer receive any royalties (bonus or otherwise) from ASCAP for these removed works.
• Audio Feature Premium (i.e., bonus payments for qualifying works performed on terrestrial radio, satellite radio and certain audio streaming services): These payments will be phased out at a rate of 25% per quarter over the first four quarters immediately following the Removal Effective Date.

Why we phase out Audio Feature Premiums

ASCAP collects revenues from thousands of licensees whose performances are not surveyed (aka “Unsurveyed Licensees”), due to the impracticality of surveying each and every one of them. These include most General Licensees – bars, restaurants, hotels, etc. The fees from these “Unsurveyed Licenses” are currently allocated to fund Audio Feature Premium payments, as audio feature performances are a reasonable proxy for music performed under Unsurveyed Licenses.

Unsurveyed Licenses generally renew automatically each year on the anniversary date of the individual license; which could be on any date in a given year. Because it would be impractical to track the specific termination dates of all Unsurveyed Licenses and match them to the date that a resigned writer’s works are removed from the ASCAP repertory, the distributions from these fees are paid to writers and publishers of removed works by “phasing out” the Audio Feature Premium over the four quarters following the Removal Effective Date, as follows:

Submitting a notice of resignation may mean that you are ineligible to receive an award at any of ASCAP’s award shows, even if you continue to receive ASCAP distributions for your works. For more information about eligibility, please review our Awards Show Rules page here: https://www.ascap.com/news-events/awards/awards-rules

Contact our Global Services team at 1-800-95-ASCAP.