You Got a PRO Demand Letter: How to Respond

A licensing letter or a run of phone calls from ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, or GMR is lawful collection by the copyright owners' authorized agent, not a scam. It is also not something you have to resolve tonight. Between "ignore it" and "panic and pay whatever they ask" is an order of operations that protects you, and the order matters more than the speed.

If a lawsuit has already been filed and served, or the letter states a firm court deadline, that is the point to consult a licensed attorney rather than self-help. Everything below is the procedure for the far more common case: a letter or repeated calls, and a decision about what to do next.

First, Slow Down: This Is Not a Same-Day Emergency

The contact usually arrives after a venue’s public event listings or an in-person visit put it on a PRO’s radar, and it escalates on a cadence measured in months and years, not hours. The mechanics of how that process runs are covered on the page about how PRO enforcement actually works. For the response decision, one point carries the weight: you have time to get this right, so use it to verify rather than to react.

Time is not the same as safety, though. Ignoring the contact indefinitely is where venues get hurt. In BMI v. Evie’s Tavern Ellenton, the copyright owners sued after the venue “publicly performed six copyrighted works without a license despite numerous cease and desist letters and phone calls,” and the court granted summary judgment, statutory damages, attorneys’ fees, and a permanent injunction, all affirmed on appeal. The owner was named individually as a defendant. Waiting to respond well is fine. Not responding is the path that produced that judgment.

The one situation that changes the clock is formal legal process. A filed and served complaint, or a letter from a law firm setting a specific deadline, is a different posture from a licensing letter or a sales call, and it is the point to bring in counsel.

The Response Sequence

Work these in order. Each step ends in something concrete, and skipping ahead is what turns a manageable licensing question into a larger one.

Step 1: Verify the Sender and Confirm the Claim Is Yours

Confirm the contact is genuinely from the PRO it names before you engage on the substance. A legitimate licensing communication identifies the PRO and typically carries an account or reference number; you can confirm it by contacting the organization directly through the phone number or address on its own website, not only the number in the letter.

Confirm the claim is actually about your business as it exists now. Licensing records go stale, and letters reach former owners, prior tenants at your address, or a dissolved entity that no longer operates. If the letter names a business you bought, closed, or never ran, that is a factual response to make in writing, with documentation of the ownership or closure dates, rather than a bill to pay.

Ask that further communication be put in writing. That is a reasonable request, it gives you a record, and it lets you respond deliberately instead of on an unrecorded call.

Step 2: Identify Exactly What Is Being Claimed

Pin down the specifics before you evaluate anything: which PRO is writing, which catalog it represents, what music use it says your venue has (live performances, recorded or streamed music, TV, karaoke), and what time period and dollar figure it asserts. No single license covers all four PROs, so a letter from one does not resolve the others, and the amount a PRO quotes turns on inputs like occupancy and how music is used, which are worth checking against your actual operation before any payment.

Answer accurately and only about what you can confirm. You are not required to volunteer a history of everything you have ever played, and guessing about the past on the spot helps no one; state the facts you know, in writing, and correct anything the letter gets wrong about your setup.

Step 3: Test the One Exemption Before You Assume You Owe

There is exactly one federal exemption that turns on venue size, and it is narrower than the version that circulates online. It reaches only a broadcast radio or television signal received on-site, and only below a size threshold with no cover charge and no re-transmission (17 U.S.C. §110(5)(B)). Recorded music, a streaming account, a background-music service, live performances, DJs, and karaoke fall outside it at any size. Whether it reaches your venue, and how to check, is worked through with a screener on the page about the §110(5) exemption.

Most venues that play music are not exempt, because most play recorded or live music the exemption never covered. A minority genuinely qualify: the sports bar showing broadcast television within the device limits, or the small café playing only over-the-air radio. Running this check is worth a few minutes because it decides whether the rest of the sequence is about licensing or about documenting a real exemption.

Step 4: Weigh the Real Options

Once you know what is claimed and whether the exemption applies, the honest option set is wider than “pay us” or “buy a service,” and none of it involves dodging a valid obligation.

• If you qualify for the exemption on solid grounds, keep a short written record of your setup (the broadcast source, the square footage, the absence of a cover charge) and state your position factually in writing. Document first, because the penalty for claiming the exemption wrongly is steep (Step 5).
• If you owe, license and negotiate within the rate structure. PRO rates are not adjudicated line items, and there is room to right-size a license to your actual use. ASCAP and BMI operate under federal consent decrees, so a venue that cannot agree on a fee can seek a court-set reasonable rate; SESAC and GMR do not have that backstop, so their fees are set by private agreement. What a license costs and which PROs apply is covered on which PROs apply and what a license costs.
• If the claim is wrong, because the business closed, the entity is misnamed, or the music use described is not yours, respond in writing with the correcting facts and your documentation.

Step 5: Avoid the Moves That Make It Worse

Four mistakes account for most of the self-inflicted damage:

• Ignoring it. The contact does not expire because you stop reading it, and Evie’s Tavern is what the end of that road looks like.
• Admitting facts carelessly on a call. An off-the-cuff statement about what you have played can become the other side’s evidence. This is not a reason to be evasive; it is a reason to verify the claim first and then respond accurately in writing.
• Claiming the exemption without reasonable grounds. A proprietor who asserts a §110(5) defense and “did not have reasonable grounds to believe that its use of a copyrighted work was exempt” owes, on top of ordinary damages, twice the license fee that should have been paid for up to the preceding three years (§504(d)). A close call is not a reason to stop paying and hope.
• Treating the anger as a plan. The fees can feel unreasonable, and the letters can feel relentless. Neither feeling changes the statute or the exposure, and acting on it instead of on the facts is how a routine license becomes a lawsuit.

Why the Order Matters: The Damages Asymmetry

The reason to move deliberately rather than defensively is the gap between a license and a judgment. A blanket license is typically a few hundred to a few thousand dollars a year. Statutory damages under §504(c) run from $750 to $30,000 per work, up to $150,000 per work for willful infringement, and as low as $200 for innocent infringement. A court does not have to find that a venue acted willfully to award damages within the ordinary range; in Evie’s Tavern, the court “did not need to make a finding as to whether [the] infringement was innocent or willful” to award statutory damages. The depth of how those numbers are calculated, and what real cases have produced, is on what losing actually costs. For the response decision, the takeaway is simpler: the downside of getting this wrong is many times the cost of getting it right, which is exactly why the verify-and-check sequence comes before any payment or any refusal.

When to Stop Self-Helping and Call a Lawyer

Most licensing letters do not require an attorney to answer sensibly. A few situations do, and recognizing them is part of responding well:

• A lawsuit has been filed and served, or a complaint is attached.
• The letter sets a specific legal deadline, or comes on law-firm letterhead demanding a response by a date.
• A settlement figure is on the table that you cannot evaluate against your actual use.
• Personal liability is in play, which for an owner-operator it often is: in Evie’s Tavern, the owner was named individually.

Sending a reader to counsel in these cases is the honest answer, not a hedge. The point of the sequence above is to make sure you reach that decision informed about your real position, rather than talked into it or out of it.

The annotated specimen letter needs JavaScript to display; the response sequence above covers the same ground.

Keep the one-page version beside the phone: the same response sequence, the four mistakes, and the call-a-lawyer triggers fit on a single printable page — open it and print it. It is dated, and the printed sheet points back to this page.

What Most Venues Do Next

The honest reading is that most venues that play music owe public-performance fees, so for most letter-holders the useful path is to confirm the claim, rule out or document the exemption, and then license at a right-sized rate. That is a manageable outcome reached calmly, not a crisis.

If you are still not sure whether your setup owes anything, start with the §110(5) exemption check. If you want to understand how the contact and any escalation actually work, that is on the page about how PRO enforcement works. For an overview of the whole situation and where a PRO contact fits, see the hub page on PRO letters and calls.

Frequently Asked Questions

Should I Ignore an ASCAP or BMI Letter?

No. The contact does not go away because you stop opening it, and unresolved accounts move toward litigation. In BMI v. Evie’s Tavern Ellenton, the venue was sued and lost after playing copyrighted music despite repeated cease-and-desist letters and phone calls, and the judgment (summary judgment, statutory damages, attorneys’ fees, and an injunction) was affirmed on appeal. Responding does not mean paying immediately; it means verifying the claim and answering it. Silence is the one response with a documented bad ending.

Is a PRO Demand Letter a Scam?

Generally no. ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, and GMR are legitimate organizations that license the public-performance rights federal law gives to songwriters and publishers, and they collect as the owners’ authorized agent. That does not mean every letter is accurate about your specific business, so the first move is to confirm the contact really comes from the PRO it names (through the organization’s own published contact information) and that the claim describes your venue as it actually operates.

ASCAP Keeps Calling My Bar. Do I Have to Talk to Them?

You are not obligated to discuss the details of your music use on an unscheduled call. A reasonable and common response is to ask that all further communication be put in writing, which gives you a record and time to verify the claim before you respond. That is not the same as ignoring the contact; put your position in writing rather than negotiating or admitting facts off-the-cuff by phone.

How Long Do I Have to Respond?

A licensing letter itself does not usually carry a statutory deadline, and the overall contact cadence runs over months to years, so there is normally time to respond deliberately. That changes if a lawsuit has been filed and served or a letter sets a specific legal deadline, because a served complaint carries a real court response window. Treat a formal filing as the trigger to consult an attorney promptly.

Can I Negotiate What a PRO Charges?

Within limits, yes. A blanket license can be right-sized to your actual use, and PROs will work out terms. ASCAP and BMI operate under federal consent decrees that let a venue seek a court-set reasonable rate if the two sides cannot agree, which is a form of leverage; SESAC and GMR are not under those decrees, so their fees are set by private agreement. Negotiating the price of a license you owe is legitimate; refusing a license you do owe is the path that leads back to the damages asymmetry.

The Letter Went to the Previous Owner or My Closed Business. What Do I Do?

Respond in writing with the correcting facts and documentation of the ownership change or closure dates, rather than paying a claim that is not yours or ignoring it. Licensing records lag reality, and a letter addressed to a business that no longer exists, or to an owner who has sold it, is a factual dispute to resolve on paper. Keep a copy of everything you send.