Who Gets Paid When a Song Is Used In an Olympics Routine?

If U.S. gymnastics superstar Simone Biles were to perform her triple-twisting double backflip to Taylor Swift’s “.

..Ready For It?” at the Paris Olympics, as she did at the trials in late June, NBC almost certainly won’t need a costly special license to air the track live.

NBC pays performing rights organizations ASCAP, BMI and SESAC for blanket public-performance licenses, and the PROs distribute the royalty payments to their hundreds of thousands of members, such as songwriters, publishers and composers, from Paul McCartney to Dua Lipa to Swift herself. These payments can add up to big money: The 2020 Olympics drew more than 3 billion viewers, a key factor in determining performance-royalty payments. “The larger the audience for the broadcast will generally result in a higher royalty,” says an ASCAP spokesperson.

For the live TV broadcast, or online live-streaming, the blanket licenses cover all the necessary song rights — foreign PROs pay for the foreign TV broadcast rights and U.S. PROs pay for the U.

S. rights. It gets trickier if NBC decides to use the song later, in a delayed broadcast, highlight video or some kind of YouTube-style on-demand streaming.

In such cases, says Joy Butler , a Washington, D.C., entertainment and digital-technology attorney and author of The Permission Seeker’s Guide Through the Legal Jungle, NBC might need a separate synch license, negotiated with a publisher.

“But NBC might have reasons to not obtain that sync,” Butler adds.