ASCAP and the Radio Music License Committee (RMLC) have reached a settlement to end their lawsuit over the licensing rates paid by thousands of radio stations, the groups said Monday (Aug. 18).

Hours after rival BMI announced it had reached such a deal with RMLC, ASCAP said that it, too, had settled its own parallel lawsuit against the radio group. Like BMI’s statement, the announcement from ASCAP said the deal had secured substantially higher rates for songwriters and publishers.

“This deal locks in an important royalty stream for our members at higher rates,” ASCAP CEO Elizabeth Matthews said. “It will deliver enhanced benefits, payments and financial certainty to ASCAP songwriters, composers and publishers, which is important to ensuring their creative and economic health and security now and in the future.”

Unlike the agreement between BMI and RMLC, the terms of the ASCAP settlement were not disclosed in court filings. ASCAP’s previous licensing rate had 1.73 percent of net revenue; it’s unclear what the higher rate will be under the new deal.

Neither side would share specific details about the agreement. ASCAP said the deal includes “year-over-year increases” in the blanket license rate paid by nearly 10,000 stations, but did not share exact rates nor the years covered by the agreement.

In its statement, ASCAP said the new deal “better reflects the ways in which AM/FM radio stations in the US currently broadcast and transmit music to their listeners” while also “recognizing the distinctions between the terrestrial radio industry and internet music services.”

RMLC’s case against ASCAP was quietly dropped on Friday (Aug. 15), court records show. After BMI’s settlement was announced on Monday, Billboard asked ASCAP whether it, too, had reached a deal with RMLC. Hours later, ASCAP announced that a settlement had indeed been struck.

Reached by Billboard, RMLC executive director Bill Velez confirmed the ASCAP settlement but declined to offer any details, saying only that the “terms of the new license are confidential.”

Whenever details are released, they’re sure to be compared with BMI’s deal, which will see that group’s rates jump from 1.78 percent under the old agreement to 2.14 percent, then increase gradually to 2.20 percent by the end of the term. That deal is retroactive to January 2022, will run until January 2029, and will apply to 8,895 radio stations. BMI hailed it as “a historic rate increase” for its members.

RMLC filed its lawsuit against ASCAP in June 2022, using a standard legal procedure to ask a federal court in New York to decide what rates its stations should pay. But the lawsuit took the novel step of filing a single rate-setting case against both BMI and ASCAP — the two biggest performance rights organizations (PROs) in the country, which collect performance royalties for the vast majority of American musical compositions.

The new tactic, enabled by the Music Modernization Act and its sweeping legal reforms in the music industry, would have, in effect, pitted BMI and ASCAP against each other, forcing them to argue over market share and thus what percentage of radio advertising each should be paid.

But BMI and ASCAP both strongly objected to the move, and the combined case was rejected in 2023 by a federal judge, who said RMLC would need to litigate the two cases separately. In 2023, the group filed a separate rate-setting lawsuit against just ASCAP; it was this case that ASCAP and RMLC announced had been settled on Monday.