Every time you play your own songs live there is a performance royalty waiting for you, whether the room holds fifty people or seventy five thousand. Simon Pursehouse of Sentric explains how Gigs and Clubs, Major Live Events and Festivals each pay out, and why leaving that money unclaimed makes no sense.

Simon Pursehouse is Global Head of Music Development at Sentric, part of Believe Music Publishing. He has been an integral part of Sentric since the company's infancy, overseeing the signing of Sentric's first artist in 2006 and its growth into an established community of hundreds of thousands of songwriters.

Simon works within the Business Development and Creative departments, bringing in songwriters and catalogues, and also organising sync writing camps.

Find Simon on his Substack, where his full Life Cycle of a Music Publishing Copyright series lives, and on Instagram at @pursehouse.

Hiya.

The wonderfully weird world of music publishing is complex, complicated and convoluted. So much so that I went and wrote this magnum opus of an eighteen chapter blog series on it all, entitled The Life Cycle of a Music Publishing Copyright, to try and make sense of it all for you songwriters. For now though, the folk at Artist Republic have asked me to focus on all things gigs.

Did you know that if you play songs that you wrote at pretty much any gig, then you, as a songwriter, are owed royalties for that? That's nice, hey?

Sadly they don't just magically get to you though. First you have to make sure your songs are registered with your local Performing Rights Organisation. If you're reading this in the UK, then hopefully you'll have heard of the PRS (the Performing Right Society). The PRS is the UK's PRO and each major territory has its own. Germany has GEMA, France has SACEM, Australia has APRA, the USA has BMI, ASCAP and SESAC, and so on and so on.

Once you've registered your copyrights with them, either directly or by using a service like us here at Sentric, you then have to let them (or us) know key information in order to ensure these gigging royalties come to you.

Within the world of performance royalties for gigs there are three categories here in the UK: Gigs and Clubs, Major Live Events, and Festivals.

Gigs and Clubs

This category covers venues where live music isn't the main reason the doors are open. The pub, bar or club puts bands on to bring people in, and that's one of the ways it makes its money. Any venue that plays music at all, whether that's a band, a jukebox or a DJ, needs a licence from PRS, and under the Gigs and Clubs scheme you'll receive roughly £5 for each show you play, however many of your songs are in the set.

Here's how that fiver finds its way to you.

The venue tells PRS what kind of place it is: how many people it holds, that it has bands on three nights a week, karaoke one night and the jukebox the rest of the time.

PRS works out the licence on that basis and charges the venue a yearly fee.

When you play there, your publisher tells PRS that you performed at that venue on that date, and lists the registered songs in your set.

PRS then pays around £5 out of the licence fee the venue has already handed over, to you as the songwriter and to your publisher.

The point worth underlining is that none of this comes out of the venue's or the promoter's pocket on the night. Nobody loses out because you claimed it, and the money is yours by right. I've had artists tell me they're worried they'll stop getting booked if someone goes around chasing venues for money. As the steps above show, that simply isn't how it works.

If you've never claimed these royalties, in some cases you can go back and claim for gigs from roughly the last 12 months. The venue has already paid PRS for them, so leaving that money unclaimed makes very little sense. Claim it.

Major Live Events

As the name suggests, these are bigger gigs where the amount of performance royalties you get is dependent on:

The ticket price

The amount of tickets sold

Your set length and billing position

Currently in the UK, the Major Live Events tariff is 4.2% of the gross ticket sales. So let's do some hashtag quick maths.

You play a venue with a 1,000 person capacity

You sell it out (well done you)

Tickets are £25 a pop

1,000 x £25 = £25,000

4.2% of £25,000 = £1,050

That £1,050 will be split between songwriters who wrote the songs performed by the headliner and the support act (weighted in favour of the former, as they have the larger audience and will be on stage for longer)

How about a cheeky real life example? We look after an artist who was asked to support a well known British indie band on a month long tour around the UK in venues circa the 2,000 capacity mark. They were offered £50 a night to cover their petrol and food, so they did it knowing they'd lose money overall, but decided it was worth it in a bid to sell copies of their album and make new fans. Around three distributions later they brought home £4.5k in performance royalties alone, which was more than they'd ever generated through any other income stream before, including record sales.

And another? A long time ago an artist who uses our rolling 28 day publishing service won a competition to support Bon Jovi at a football stadium. They did a quick 20 minute set early on in the evening and they bagged £8,000+ in performance royalties. Winner. So if you consider the fact that if they received that much for twenty minutes, then Bon Jovi would have pocketed £72k for their three hours on stage. And that's per gig on a worldwide stadium tour. Basically, as soon as you've finished reading this, go and write the next Livin' on a Prayer.

Festivals

These work rather similarly to Major Live Events, but with a different tariff. The current festival tariff at the PRS is 2.7% of gross ticket sales, so again, let's do some hashtag quick maths.

You play a festival with a 75,000 person capacity

The festival sells out (well done them)

Tickets are £235

75,000 x £235 = £17,625,000

2.7% of £17,625,000 = £475,875

That £475,875 will be split between songwriters who wrote the songs performed by all the bands across all the stages (weighted in favour of those on the bigger stages with the prime time slots, as they'll have the bigger audience)

Hopefully by now you can see there's real money to be made from performing your publishing copyrights live, be it in local pubs, on national tours or during festival slots. Just be sure to register your gig claims as soon as you've played them in order to receive your royalties as soon as possible.

And remember, gigs are just one income stream for your music publishing royalties. There's also radio, TV, streaming, sync and more. Be sure to get clued up on how all of them work so you're maximising every single penny you deserve.