Modernizing Royalty Distribution for More Than 1.4 Million Music Creators

Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI) is a global leader in music rights management and the largest performing rights organization in the United States. Founded in 1939, BMI is the link between music creators and the businesses that play their music publicly, representing more than 22 million musical works owned by over 1.4 million songwriters, composers, and music publishers.

In more than 85 years, BMI has adapted repeatedly as distribution has shifted, most recently to digital streaming. That shift changed what people expect from BMI. Affiliates want visibility into how their work performs, and businesses that use music want to license it without working through a process built for an earlier era.

In 2023, BMI began modernizing its core systems, including the portals affiliates and licensees use and the performance, rights, and royalty processes behind them. GlobalLogic became a key engineering partner in that program, bringing 15+ years of media domain expertise to the work. Delivery runs through a dedicated “BMI Lab” in Romania that operates as an extension of BMI’s own team.

Challenge

BMI’s core systems had grown up around an earlier model of music distribution.

Modernizing its legacy architecture called for a comprehensive overhaul, driven by the tight integration of performance tracking, rights management, and royalty distribution. Since upstream modifications directly impact downstream calculations, maintaining exact precision was essential for every stage of development.

Consequently, BMI prioritized accuracy above all else, combining adaptive system architecture with automated workflows to eliminate persistent manual friction.

Value Created

The BMI Lab delivered across BMI’s core platforms, covering the portals affiliates and licensees use and the performance, rights, and royalty systems behind them.

Affiliate Portal and Experience
GlobalLogic worked with BMI to modernize its existing affiliate portal and built a new one, giving songwriters, composers, and publishers direct visibility into how their music performs.

B2B Licensing Solution
A new licensing solution lets venues and businesses configure and customize licenses for BMI actual music usage.

Performance Measurement
GlobalLogic and BMI modernized the systems that capture and measure music performance.

Rights Administration
Modernized rights administration systems track ownership and shares across a repertoire of more than 22 million works, the record every royalty calculation depends on.

Royalty Calculation and Distribution
Modernized calculation and distribution processes turn measured performance into payments, improving accuracy and reducing the time between a performance and a payment.

CI/CD Across the Organization
CI/CD pipelines used across BMI engineering give every team a repeatable release path and lower the risk of shipping changes to production systems.

Embedded Delivery Model
The BMI Lab operates as a dedicated extension of BMI’s engineering organization, with GlobalLogic teams contributing upskilling and technical depth directly into BMI’s own delivery cadence.

Impact

Faster, more accurate royalty distribution.
Modernized measurement, rights administration, and calculation processes speed and sharpen distribution to the songwriters, composers, and music publishers BMI represents, the outcome BMI’s own leadership points to as the measure of the program.

Greater visibility for affiliates.
The new and modernized affiliate portals give creators a direct view of how their music is performing, alongside a faster, less manual path through onboarding.

Self-service licensing for businesses.
The B2B licensing solution lets venues configure and customize licenses for their own music usage, improving sales efficiency and streamlining the licensing lifecycle.

Safer, more frequent releases.
Organization-wide CI/CD gives BMI engineering teams a repeatable release path for the systems the business runs on.