AIMPRO: The First Performance Rights Organization for Generative AI Music Creators
AIMPRO launches as the first performance rights organisation built for generative AI music creators, introducing new licensing, registration, and royalty models that could reshape
AIMPRO, first announced on March 27, 2026 at the AlgoRhythms conference at Indiana University and broadly covered through the trade press on April 29, 2026, has positioned itself as the world’s first Performance Rights Organization built specifically for the creators of generative AI music, with a free membership tier, a 15% fee on collected income, a $9.99-per-month Pro tier that opens up a searchable licensing marketplace, blanket licenses “purpose-built for AI music platforms, apps and APIs,” and monthly distributions modeled on conventional PRO accounting
Music Ally; AIMPRO official site; AIMPRO press release coverage; Zinstrel analysis; Jack Righteous breakdown; AmpVortex commentary
Co-founders Steve Stewart, a veteran music manager whose résumé includes Stone Temple Pilots, the music-tech firm Vezt, and the publishing/sync/licensing firm SongHub, and Joe Berman, a 25-year publishing and licensing veteran who co-founded SongHub with Stewart, have framed the launch as a response to the gap left by the established collecting societies, whose stated posture as of late 2025 is to accept registrations of “partially” AI-assisted works while remaining cautious about fully generative outputs (ASCAP/BMI/SOCAN October 2025 alignment release; MBW coverage).
The Independent Music Brief | April 30, 2026
Performance Rights Organizations are the institutions that license public performance rights on behalf of songwriters and publishers, collect royalties from licensees (broadcast radio, streaming services, fitness chains, restaurants), and pay those royalties out to members on a quarterly distribution cycle. ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, GMR, and the global affiliate network, SOCAN in Canada, PRS in the United Kingdom, GEMA in Germany, SACEM in France, and dozens of others, operate as the indie songwriter’s primary collective representation in commercial-use licensing. The model works because the catalog any one PRO represents is large enough to make blanket licensing economically rational for licensees, and the distribution accounting is precise enough to route the right share of license revenue to the right writer and publisher.
AIMPRO is the first institution that has built a registration, licensing, and royalty-distribution infrastructure on the explicit assumption that the AI-music creator population needs its own collective representation, regardless of whether the existing PROs ultimately extend their registration rules to fully generative works. The organizational thesis Stewart and Berman have articulated is that AI music creators, a population that includes solo prompt-and-edit operators, sample-pack producers using generative tools to extend or modify their own catalog, and AI-platform developers building commercial offerings on top of generative engines, advertising, and platform use, need a registration infrastructure now, not on the timeline that the existing PROs and the U.S. Copyright Office and the international rights platform will eventually reach to.
What AIMPRO Actually Is
The AIMPRO product, as documented in its launch coverage and on its official site, has four distinct components that each map to a different part of the conventional PRO operating model. The first is registration: AIMPRO accepts submissions of generative-AI compositions and recordings, documents the chain-of-title (prompt history, model used, human contribution if any, derivative-works disclosure), and creates a registration record that the organization can use to license the work. The registration step is the foundational activity, and AIMPRO’s framing of it is that registration is open to “individuals but also developers and platforms generating music,” which is meaningfully broader than the individual-writer model the established PROs use as their default registration unit.
The second component is the licensing function. AIMPRO offers blanket licenses described as “purpose-built for AI music platforms, apps and APIs,” which is the structural acknowledgment that the licensee population for AI-derivative use cases is materially different from the licensee population the existing PROs serve. A traditional PRO blanket license is sold to a venue, a broadcaster, or a streaming service for the right to publicly perform any composition in the licensor’s catalog; the AIMPRO blanket license is sold to AI platforms, generative-tool operators, and API consumers for the right to incorporate, train against, or distribute AI-generated music outputs from AIMPRO-registered creators. The licensee composition is the part of the AIMPRO framework that creates the most direct competitive tension with the established PROs, because every dollar of licensing revenue that flows from an AI-platform licensee to AIMPRO is a dollar that does not flow into the conventional PRO blanket-license pool, and the indie-songwriter share of that conventional pool is correspondingly reduced.
The third component is distribution: AIMPRO commits to monthly distributions, which is faster than the quarterly cycle the established PROs operate on, and which matches the cash-flow expectations of the AI-creator population whose work is monetized at a faster cadence than traditional songwriting. The 15% fee AIMPRO retains on collected income is in line with the 10–15% range that conventional PROs and rights administrators take, which suggests AIMPRO is positioning its take rate as competitive rather than transformative. The free-membership tier is the structural choice that lowers the barrier to registration for the long tail of AI creators who would not be willing or able to absorb the membership costs that some PROs and music-rights platforms charge.
The fourth component is the marketplace, which the $9.99-per-month Pro tier opens up. The AIMPRO marketplace is described as “live, searchable” with “verified chain of title,” and is open to commercial users, filmmakers, advertisers, media producers, sync houses, brand-content shops, and the broader population of commercial-music buyers, looking for AI-generated tracks that come with documented licensing rights. The marketplace is open to members of all PROs, which is the diplomatic choice that signals AIMPRO is not trying to lock the licensee population inside an exclusive AIMPRO-only venue but is instead trying to capture the licensing economics of the AI-music sector while leaving the broader PRO platform in place.
Today’s Indie Radar
Chord Music Partners, the catalog-investment platform jointly managed by Dundee Partners and Universal Music Group, priced a $500 million Series 2026-1 senior-note offering, secured by a portfolio of more than 3,750 musical compositions and master recordings independently valued at approximately $830 million.
Apollo Global Management press release; Music Business Worldwide; Asset Securitization Report; Digital Music News; BusinessWire
The Suicideboys, Morgan Wallen, and Ryan Tedder rights anchor the underlying catalog, which is split roughly 34% publishing royalties and 66% sound-recording royalties, and the offering uses the Canon Music Issuer Trust as its long-term financing vehicle with Apollo Global Securities and ATLAS SP Securities as joint bookrunners. The 5.560% yield and 160 bps spread set a new tightness floor for the music-royalty ABS market, and the precedent matters for the indie-catalog community because it establishes the cost-of-capital benchmark that smaller catalog issuers and emerging music-royalty financing platforms will be benchmarked against by the rating agencies and institutional investors. Indie catalog owners considering bond-style financing for their own catalogs, through Royalty Exchange, Musicow, SongVest, Jukebox, or the boutique advisor network that has been building around fractional royalty sales, should treat the Chord pricing as the cost-of-capital data point that informs whether their own catalog is large enough, predictable enough, and credit-rated enough to access the institutional bond market on comparable terms or whether the smaller fractional-sale platforms remain the more economically rational route.