How to Register a Song You Co-Wrote With Someone in Another Country

You wrote a song over Zoom with someone in another country. Both of you want to get paid. There is no international PRO to register with, and you don't join a society in every country your song gets played in — so how does it work?

Each writer registers with their own society

The rule is simple: you join the collecting society where you live, and only that one. A writer in the US joins ASCAP, BMI or SESAC. A writer in the UK joins PRS. Germany is GEMA, France is SACEM, the Netherlands is Buma/Stemra, Canada is SOCAN, Ireland is IMRO, Australia and New Zealand are APRA AMCOS.

Those societies have reciprocal agreements with each other. When your song is played in Germany, GEMA collects it and passes your share to your home society, which pays you. You never deal with GEMA directly.

Both writers register the same song, separately

Here is the part that goes wrong. Each writer registers the work with their own society, declaring:

• The song title — exactly the same string on both sides, including punctuation and any parenthetical.

• Every writer's full legal name and their IPI/CAE number.

• Each writer's society affiliation.

• The splits, identical on both registrations.

The societies then reconcile the two registrations into one work. If the numbers don't match, the work goes into a dispute or suspense state and nothing gets distributed to anyone — including the writer whose numbers were right.

What actually causes the money to stall

• Mismatched splits. One writer files 50/50, the other files 60/40 from a conversation they remember differently. Both shares freeze.

• Title variants. "Midnight Drive" and "Midnight Drive (feat. X)" registered as the same work by different societies.

• Missing IPI numbers. Your co-writer's name alone isn't enough to identify them across societies. The IPI is the unique identifier, and every affiliated writer has one.

• One writer never registered. Their share sits unclaimed while yours pays out — and in some societies unmatched shares affect distribution of the whole work.

• Nobody registered the publisher side. If either of you is self-published and hasn't registered a publishing entity, that half goes uncollected. See publisher share vs writer share.

The five-minute prevention

Before either of you registers anything, agree a single record of the song and both work from it: exact title, each writer's legal name, IPI, society, and splits totalling exactly 100%. Send it to each other. Register from the same document.

This is what a split sheet is for, and it's why the IPI field on one matters as much as the percentage.

Timing and expectations

International royalties are slow. Money moves from the foreign society to yours to you, in distribution cycles that are typically quarterly, often with a lag of six to eighteen months from the actual usage. A co-write registered today may show its first foreign income more than a year out. That's normal and not evidence of a problem.

Keep one canonical record of every song

Musavise's catalogue tool stores each song with every writer's legal name, PRO and IPI, flags any song whose splits don't total 100%, and exports the whole thing — so both sides of a cross-border co-write can register from identical numbers instead of from memory. The royalty hub tracks which registrations you've actually completed.

All of it lives in one free Musavise account — free means free, within honest limits, and your data exports whenever you want it. Create your free account; it takes about two minutes.