[5] ASCAP has drawn negative attention for attempting to enforce licensing fees when songs are used in informal occasions such as campfire singing and open mic nights.

ASCAP was founded on February 13, 1914, by Victor Herbert, together with composers George Botsford,[6] Silvio Hein, Irving Berlin, Louis Hirsch, John Raymond Hubbell, Gustave Kerker, and Jean Schwartz;[7] lyricist Glen MacDonough; publishers George Maxwell (who served as its first president) and Jay Witmark and copyright attorney Nathan Burkan in New York City, to protect the copyrighted musical compositions of its members, who were mostly writers and publishers associated with Tin Pan Alley.

[8] ASCAP's earliest members included the era's most active songwriters, George M. Cohan, Rudolf Friml, Otto Harbach, Jerome Kern, John Philip Sousa, Alfred Baldwin Sloane, James Weldon Johnson, Robert Hood Bowers and Harry Tierney.

[11] In 1919, ASCAP and the Performing Rights Society of Great Britain (since 1997 known as PRS for Music), signed the first reciprocal agreement for the representation of each other's members' works in their respective territories.

Today, ASCAP has global reciprocal agreements and licenses the U.S. performances of hundreds of thousands of international music creators.

[13][14] During a ten-month period lasting from January 1 to October 29, 1941, no music licensed by ASCAP (1,250,000 songs) was broadcast on NBC and CBS radio stations.

[15] In 1941, an antitrust lawsuit brought by the United States Department of Justice resulted in ASCAP and BMI being governed under consent decrees that required both organizations to offer blanket licenses of their catalogs to all at rates negotiated between the parties or set by a federal judge.

[18][19] Differences in BMI's structure, including providing advance payments on songs, and an early embrace of country, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll led to an increase in the organization's market share in the 1940s and 1950s.

ASCAP lobbied Congress for laws that would bar broadcasters from owning BMI stock in 1958, and provided the impetus to launch payola investigations at the end of the decade.

[24] By 1970, a new generation of ASCAP board members decided to launch a campaign to attract more songwriters and music publishers away from BMI.

Lawrence Lessig, a co-founder of Creative Commons, responded stating that they are not aiming to undermine copyright, and invited ASCAP for a public debate.

This was delivered via a memo to hundreds of thousands of members from CEO Elizabeth Matthews, who said the global disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic was to blame.