No. BMI Live is intended for non-classical performances. Quarterly royalty payments from BMI Live are completely separate from the annual Live Classical royalty distribution, For more information, please review our guidelines for reporting classical performances.

Some international societies in Europe and Asia have shortened their reporting deadlines significantly. As a result, it is now imperative to report all international live classical concerts within six months of the performance date. Send us a copy of the concert program (or other acceptable documentation) along with a completed International Report Form via email to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), or via regular mail to:

BMI Classical
7 World Trade Center
250 Greenwich Street
New York, NY 10007-0030

We strongly recommend using email reporting to ensure faster processing. For more information, please review our guidelines for reporting classical performances.

No. Royalties from radio play are based on a statistical sample. BMI uses performance monitoring data, continuously collected on a large percentage of all licensed commercial radio stations, to determine payable performances. We cannot accept performance reports from our writers or publishers for radio broadcasts.

Text found on the internet without attribution to the author or a publication date is not necessarily in the public domain. Before you can register this work with BMI, you should contact the website’s administrator to determine the copyright holder. Written permission to use any copyrighted text is required before you can register the work with BMI.

You may register a suite from the ballet for concert presentation.

Yes. Although BMI doesn’t license theatrical or dramatic musical presentations, we do pay for radio broadcast of operas, operettas and musicals, as well as excerpts from dramatic works, and those presentations that are unstaged concert versions.

Music written in service to a film or television show is not registered as classical at BMI, regardless of instrumentation or how the music sounds. BMI will pay the cues based on the cue sheet we receive from the production company. Please don’t register film or TV cues to your catalog.

At BMI, you need not affiliate a publishing entity in order to receive publishing shares, as we pay all royalties (writer and publisher) to the composer on any self-published works. If you prefer to receive your composer and publisher royalty streams separately, you may affiliate your publishing company by completing the BMI Publisher Application Form. There is a one-time fee of $175 to affiliate an individual publisher, $250 as publishing company that is a corporation (including sole stockholder corporations) or LLC and $500 for a partnership.

When the new instrumentation of an existing work has the same title and duration, please do not re-register it, but send an email with the details to classical@bmi.com.

Works that are going straight to recorded release without live concert premieres are not registered as classical. Please register instrumental CD tracks as non-classical by selecting “all other genres” at the beginning of the registration process.

Arrangements are not eligible for the live classical distribution at BMI. Please register all arrangements as non-classical by selecting “all other genres” at the beginning of the registration process.