Guides
CWR for ASCAP
ASCAP administers performance rights in United States. One of the two big US performing rights organizations, with well over a million members.
History
Founded in 1914 by a circle of composers around Victor Herbert, ASCAP was America's first PRO, born of the same fight as Europe's societies: restaurants and theatres performing music without paying for it. It has operated under a federal consent decree since 1941, which still shapes how US performance licensing works.
CWR at ASCAP
ASCAP took bulk registrations in its own electronic formats through the 1990s and moved with the industry onto CISAC's CWR standard in the 2000s. Since March 2014 its CWR intake runs through MusicMark, the joint venture with BMI and SOCAN whose very first phase was shared CWR processing — one file, three societies, one set of validations.
Registrations flow through MusicMark, the ASCAP–BMI–SOCAN joint venture: one CWR delivery covers all three organizations. Like nearly every CISAC society, ASCAP works in the CWR 2.1 / 2.2 era — the versions in production use worldwide since the standard displaced the proprietary registration formats of the 1990s. Per-society delivery profiles do change, so confirm the current version and any local quirks before a first delivery.
Related societies
Check a CWR file free — errors and warnings tied to the exact line, nothing stored: cwrcheck.com.