What is a blanket licence? How PROs license a whole catalogue at once

A blanket licence is a single licence from a performing rights organisation (PRO) that lets a business publicly perform any song in that PRO's whole repertoire, for one flat fee or a percentage of its revenue, instead of clearing songs one by one. The US Copyright Office calls it the most common way public performance rights are licensed.

It covers the song (the composition), not the recording. It is the songwriter and publisher side of the money; the master recording is licensed separately.

Who takes one

According to the Copyright Office's 2015 report, large commercial users such as bars, restaurants, concert venues, stores and hotels often take blanket licences, paying either a percentage of gross revenue or an annual flat fee depending on the type and amount of use. Terrestrial radio stations take them too, usually negotiated through the Radio Music License Committee, and many TV stations do the same through the Television Music License Committee.

The appeal is simplicity: one contract, no need to report every track in advance, and no risk that a DJ or a background playlist strays outside what was cleared.

The alternatives

The same report lists the less common options:

Why antitrust law watches it

A blanket licence is, in effect, many competing songwriters pricing their work together. In the 1930s the US Justice Department argued that ASCAP's exclusive blanket licence was an unlawful restraint of trade; the case settled with a consent decree in 1941, and BMI got a similar decree the same year, per the Copyright Office. The decrees require the PROs to take only non-exclusive rights, license anyone who applies on non-discriminatory terms, and offer alternatives to the blanket. The current versions date from 2001 for ASCAP and 1994 for BMI, as listed by the Department of Justice.

In BMI v. CBS (1979), the Supreme Court declined to call the blanket licence per se illegal price fixing. It said the arrangement should be judged under the rule of reason, noting it solves the problem of negotiating thousands of individual licences and that users could still license directly. The DOJ's most recent review ended in January 2021 with the decrees left unchanged, MusicRow reported.

What we think

The blanket licence is one of the few parts of music licensing that works roughly as designed: a café owner does not need a lawyer to play the radio. Its weakness is the other end. Because the fee is not tied to what was actually played, how the money is split among writers depends on each PRO's sampling and reporting, and small writers whose songs get played in a thousand pubs can be poorly captured. That is our analysis, not a measured finding. If you write songs, the practical takeaway is to register every work with your PRO and report your live setlists, because the blanket licence only pays you if the PRO can see you.