Guides
CWR for BMI
BMI administers performance rights in United States. The largest US PRO by repertoire.
History
Broadcast Music, Inc. was created in 1939 by radio broadcasters as a counterweight to ASCAP, and opened its doors to the blues, country, and R&B writers the older society had passed over — a decision that put much of American popular music under its roof. It operates under a consent decree like ASCAP and has run as a for-profit since 2022.
CWR at BMI
BMI standardised on CWR alongside the rest of the CISAC world in the 2000s, and since 2014 its bulk intake is MusicMark, shared with ASCAP and SOCAN — which is why a US work is usually registered to both American PROs in one delivery.
Registrations flow through MusicMark, the ASCAP–BMI–SOCAN joint venture: one CWR delivery covers all three organizations. Like nearly every CISAC society, BMI 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.