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Sure thing Michael,

And for anyone else that might be wondering this in the future I checked with ASCAP.

As long as you have your own separate publishing membership (which I do,) if you leave your works behind when resigning you will still collect both shares …

for retitled works, or works owned by a separate publisher, you will of course only receive your writers share.

Either way I’m glad to know I won’t bleed money too severely while making the switch, other than the 9 month window BMI has on backend…

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Agreed, this really is a question for ASCAP… was just hoping you might know…
Thanks for your help, you’re a huge asset to everyone here.

Cheers!

And I’ll post what I find out in case anyone else needs to know …

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when you say “self-published” do you mean that you have a publishing company, or that you just assign the publishing to yourself?

1) I had an ASCAP publishing company. Its election date was two quarters different than my writer election date. As such, the windows for notifying ASCAP that I was switching my writer membership and moving my catalog were six months apart. That really complicated things.

2) Except for RF libraries, where I own the publishing, I have only written for 7 or 8 money-upfront exclusive libraries. I have not, and do not, retitle, so I cannot answer your questions regarding that.

3) I left all of my older library cues at ASCAP. But…a lot of library music has a “best when used by” date on it. Most of those cues are more than 10 years old and have really run their course.

Thanks Michael. Correct, I assign publishing to myself for non-exclusives that don’t retitle.

(Although recently, after talking with a company who runs a library that is connected to a post-facility in NYC I’m strongly considering moving away from retitling as much as I can in the future. The guy I spoke with owned the library and said some really insightful things from the perspective of the music supervisor that has made me reconsider it as being as “harmless” as libraries will have you believe…)

Anyway, it sounds like the way to go is to leave all works behind that have been retitled (including my original registrations which I assigned my own publishing to…)

I guess what’s not clear to me is this:

I know they’ll continue to pay you your writers share for titles left behind.

So, Assuming I ALSO leave the titles behind that I assigned my own publishing to, will they continue to pay the publishing share as well?

Thanks again!

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@MicahelL

Thanks for posting this really useful info. I’ve been interested in switching to bmi for a while now and this has been really informative. Combing blogs, a google search or whatever method always returns the same results of “they balance out over time.” Although it might be true; my experience has been the same, lots of missed usages by ASCAP … And generally a PIA to deal with when it comes to mistakes…

I’ll inquire with each library as suggested, but I’m fairly sure that not all libraries I work with will be up to moving my publishing to bmi.

It sounds like I can move my catalog to bmi for self publishing, and any retitlied works I can leave with ascap if the library wont move them, is that the gist of what you managed to do where necessary?

Do you still receive ASCAP payouts for any retitled works that you might have had to leave behind?

Assuming so, do you still see roughly the same payout rates from any ASCAP usage as before switching?(I’ve seen artists claim their payouts
dwindled after switching, but I take these comments with a grain of salt…)
Thanks again for such a helpful post.

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