Watch the Money-Go-Round

Three new bands play their own original material at a 200-capacity venue on a Tuesday night. A hundred people pay £8 each. The gross door take is £800. None of the people who wrote the songs performed that evening are members of PRS for Music. The venue operator or the show's promoter pays the bands, everyone goes home, and sometime in the next twelve months the venue receives a bill.

PRS for Music will estimate that the event was sold out, so the bill is calculated on £1,600, not £800. PRS will further assume that every song performed was written by one of their 160,000 members, despite having made no attempt to establish what was actually played. The venue must now prove otherwise by producing a full setlist for every act, details of every songwriter, ticket receipts and gross take, or pay the bill in full. PRS will also always assume that the venue was the promoter for the show. There is no right of appeal. PRS's decision is final, and I have been involved in this process for thirty years and have never once seen PRS return a royalty it had incorrectly collected.

That is the working reality of live music licensing at grassroots level in the UK, and it is the starting point of the work Music Venue Trust has been doing under the Set The Record Straight campaign. The aim is straightforward: venues and promoters should pay songwriters accurately for the songs that were actually performed, and the songwriters those royalties belong to should actually receive them. The gap between what PRS collects and what songwriters are paid is where the real story lives.

The legal position

The legal position is not complicated. When you write a song, copyright law establishes a permanent right to be paid whenever it is performed to a paying audience. That right belongs to you. A collecting society like PRS exists to exercise it on your behalf, after you have authorised it to do so. The problem is that PRS operates Tariff P and Tariff LP, the live music licences, in a way that means the royalty is collected regardless of whether you are a member, regardless of whether PRS represents your music, and regardless of whether the money collected can ever reach you.

The methodology PRS applies was designed for Taylor Swift at Wembley Stadium, and it is the same methodology applied to your band's Tuesday night show in Bromsgrove; it assumes a sold-out venue, it assumes that 100% of the music performed belongs to PRS members, and it places the entire burden of proving otherwise onto the venue operator, who is running a 200-capacity room on a Tuesday and does not have a licensing department and in many cases does not have the setlists, the songwriter credits, or the bandwidth to assemble them.

Where the money actually goes

The consequence is not merely administrative inconvenience. PRS for Music's own distribution policy sets out what happens when the correct songwriter cannot be identified: the money is distributed to members on the basis of other established usage, primarily broadcast rights. In practice, this means that when Dicky Dave and the Dullards perform their own original material at a venue, and the venue pays the royalty on it, and none of the Dullards are PRS members, the money collected in the name of their songwriting is distributed to whichever PRS members had the most radio plays that year. PRS will not accept any claim from a songwriter dated back more than three years, so even if the Dullards subsequently join, they cannot recover what was taken. You can verify all of this in PRS for Music's own publicly available distribution policy, which I would encourage you to read, on the basis that most people who have read it conclude that it cannot possibly say what it says and need to read it again.

It would be easy to read this as an argument against paying songwriting royalties. It is the opposite of that. The argument being made, by Music Venue Trust and by the venues and artists who have backed the campaign, is that songwriters should be paid for the actual songs performed, to the actual people who wrote them, and that a system which collects the royalty while remaining entirely indifferent to whether it reaches the correct songwriter is not functioning as a royalty collection system in any meaningful sense of the phrase.

The data problem

The data problem compounds everything. PRS collected £943 million in 2023, over a billion in 2024, growth driven almost entirely by the mega-tour end of the market; stadiums, arenas, festivals charging three-digit ticket prices. But the data PRS uses to describe the live music market systematically undercounts what is happening at grassroots level. Music Venue Trust's own research recorded 22 million people attending grassroots venues in 2022, a period in which PRS's own data, drawn largely from major ticketing retailers, indicated that the entire live music market sold only 30 million tickets in total. Either grassroots music venues were generating two in every three live music experiences in the UK, which would be an extraordinary thing to have been consistently missing from industry data, or the PRS dataset has a significant gap where the grassroots sector should be. The absence of that data is not a neutral administrative oversight; it means that the sector generating most of the live music activity in the UK, the circuit where new artists develop and where the catalogue of the next decade is being written, is effectively invisible to the organisation that collects the royalty on its behalf.

What Set The Record Straight is asking for

Set The Record Straight asks for transparency about what is being collected, from whom, and on what basis; for accuracy in the matching of royalties to the songs actually performed and the songwriters who wrote them; and for PRS to treat the grassroots sector as the significant and distinct part of the live music market that it is, rather than as a rounding error in a dataset built around Ticketmaster receipts. If you have played shows where the songwriting royalty was notionally collected on your behalf, the question of whether you received it, or whether it was distributed to whoever had the most radio play that year, is one that PRS for Music has shown no particular appetite to answer.

The mechanism exists. The legal right is established. The money goes in. The question of where it goes next is the one we have been trying, with considerable patience and rather more forensic evidence than PRS appears comfortable with, to have answered properly.