Everything Counts
This column is, as a rule, one person’s work, but the piece below is a dual effort. Please welcome Ryan Edwards, the founder and CEO of Audoo, to the column for a very special tag team event
PRS for Music (‘PRS’) is a billion-pound-a-year organisation, which sounds like excellent news for songwriters, or, if you watch these things closely, at least some of them. I have written extensively about this, four pieces on this Substack so far, explaining why, at a grassroots music ecosystem level, there is quite a lot of nuance hidden inside that achievement that requires unravelling.
The short version, for anyone arriving here without having read those pieces, is as follows. When a venue hosts a live music night, songwriters are entitled to collect a royalty on the songs performed at a rate of 4% of gross ticket sales, agreed by the Copyright Tribunal. PRS, a membership organisation acting on behalf of a large body of those songwriters, has ended up almost the sole claimant of that royalty. The collection happens via Tariff LP, a licence so administratively demanding that almost no grassroots venue can fully comply with it, or Tariff P, a blanket licence that makes no attempt to find out what music is actually being played in the venue. The two Tariffs, operating under something called TheMusicLicence, place PRS permanently in the driving seat of any negotiation about what is owed. It is routine for the bill PRS issues to be nothing more than a grossly inflated estimate, calculated on the assumption that the event sold out and that every song performed was written by one of their near 200,000 members. The venue must prove otherwise or pay the full amount. There is no right of appeal. I have been involved in this process for over thirty years and I have never once seen PRS return a fee it incorrectly collected.
If the venue cannot prove otherwise, and most cannot because the administrative obligations are designed for a company with a licensing department rather than a person who runs a 200-capacity room on a Tuesday, PRS collects the full estimated amount. That money then enters a distribution process governed by PRS’s own policy, which states that any royalty not claimed within three years is redistributed to their own members based on a slightly opaque set of decision making which may or may not include broadcast usage. In plain English; money collected from a show where three unsigned bands played their own original material, none of them PRS members, is eventually paid out to whoever had the most radio play that year. Taylor Swift, probably. It certainly won’t be that screamcore band you actually paid to see. The people in that band who actually wrote the songs performed that night get nothing, which is, on any reading of what a royalty collection society is supposed to do, a fairly significant design flaw.
I should say at this point, because I always have to say it, and I always have to keep saying it because people don’t want to hear it, that none of this is an argument against paying songwriting royalties. The legal right of a songwriter to be paid when their music is performed to a paying audience is correct, full stop, and I have never suggested otherwise. Ever. So please stop putting out daft press releases trying to rehash that argument over and over, because it starts to look like you don’t want to talk about the actual flaws in the actual system. The argument is about whether the royalty is reaching the people it belongs to, the people who write the songs. That is a simple question, and yet, bizarrely, it is the question PRS has spent nine years declining to answer.
Nine years is a long time to decline to answer a question, so let me be precise about what I mean. In 2014, when Music Venue Trust began its work, the data available on the grassroots sector was thin and contested. It remains a little bit too thin and therefore still too contestable, which is itself part of the problem, but I would simply state that I have never pretended otherwise. What I have done, consistently, across the last nine years, is present whatever data existed, flag its limitations explicitly, and use it to argue that the gap between what PRS assumes about grassroots programming and what the sector actually programmes deserves investigation. That position has been consistent whether I was telling a Select Committee about it, discussing it with a minister, sitting in a live music industry meeting, sitting in the PRS office, or just bending your ear about it at the bar in the Lexington. Everything we do know, which is quite a lot, suggests that the central basis of both Tariff LP and Tariff P, the assumption that PRS members write 100% of the music performed and PRS should therefore collect 100% of the money, is simply wrong.
PRS’s position, held with remarkable consistency across those same nine years, is that they don’t want to talk about or consider this, the 100% assumption is correct, no songs are ever performed unless one of their writers wrote it, and that they don’t have to show any data or evidence that would allow anyone to assess that claim. This is, I think we can all agree, a fairly bold assertion to maintain on no visible evidence for nearly a decade.
I want to be fair to them, which is something I try to do even when they are saying daft things and acting like a North Korean dictatorship. There remains an incredibly slim and remote possibility they could possibly be correct, despite common sense telling anyone who looks at this for more than a nanosecond that it is highly unlikely. The grassroots sector’s data has not been rigorous or wide enough to say with 100% confidence what percentage of it does or does not form part of the PRS catalogue. I cannot rule out that hundreds of young people across the country are forming bands solely for the purpose of playing Oasis covers on a Monday night in Bromsgrove, and so I have not ruled it out. What I can say is that PRS has produced nothing, no data, no independent analysis, no response to any specific figures, no evidence, not even a scrap of paper with ‘we iz rite’ written on it, to justify their position. Their confidence is, at this point, wildly out of step with all the evidence and data that does exist, which is not to say that if a proper study came along they couldn’t possibly be correct. Let’s put it this way; their girlfriend may well exist, we just haven’t met her, because she goes to another school, and somehow she never makes it to the parties.
The point is that it is actually possible using modern technology to settle this once and for all, and the way to do that is to run a proper, rigorous, evidence-based study, in multiple venues at once, using the best collection tools available. Then we all look at the data and see what it says. Which is what multiple people, not just me, have been begging PRS for Music to do for years, but they have simply declined to do. Multiple times, repetitively, last recently as January this year when they promised they were definitely going to do it this time. Which does leave you a little suspicious about what it might reveal that they won’t like.
It can be done, and waiting for PRS to do it seems somewhat like a fool’s errand. So it is exactly what we are going to do, with or without their help, or permission.
Here is Ryan from Audoo to tell you how:
“Over the past 8 years, at Audoo, we have developed ground breaking technology to capture, and report background, electronic (DJ) and live music that’s broadcast/performed in every type of environment. Our technology is deployed in everything from Children’s Nurseries in Amsterdam, to Dance Studios in Sydney, Hotels in Denver, Bars in Johannesburg and Pubs in Dublin – our mission has always been to simply report the truth about what happens in the real world… in 2026 nobodies royalty/ies should be paid on proxy data sets or sample surveys.
The study together with Mark and the MVT team will take place in grassroots music venues across the UK (including Bromsgrove!), selected to be representative of the sector by capacity, geography, programming model, ownership structure and the typical balance between original and cover material performed relevant to all those metrics. The selection methodology will be available in full to anyone who wants it, because the whole point of the exercise is that the data should be open to scrutiny from the moment of its collection, not just at the point of publication. If the music performed is a new artist/band, yet to record or release their music – we’ll even be able to say music was performed and isn’t (yet) represented by PRS (or another rights organisation)
In each venue, an Audoo Audio Meter will identify each song performed over the pilot period – as a general rule, if you can find a song on a major streaming platform, we have it in our library, if not, it’s likely to be unreleased and a true grassroots level artist. The output data will be factual and not an estimate derived from what PRS believes a venue of this type and size is likely to programme.
Back to Mark…”
What that gives us is a reliable dataset which can immediately sit alongside PRS’s current Tariff LP estimates for venues of equivalent profile. The comparison will produce two numbers we do not currently have. The first is how far the estimated bills diverge from what accurate usage data would generate. The second is what proportion of the music performed at grassroots level is unrecognised material, performed by artists who have not yet entered the formalised music industry; the band in Bromsgrove on a Tuesday night, who, it might turn out, have indeed written their own songs after all. Data set one: PRS, and the affiliated overseas societies that it also represents, cannot own or licence this known percentage of the performed music.
The songs that are recognised can then be tested against the PRS catalogue, provided that PRS will actually tell anyone what is in it, which it currently refuses to do. That creates the second data set; songs which have some sort of commercial release on some known platform but which are not registered with PRS or one of its affiliated societies. Data set two: PRS does not own or represent this.
I expect both divergences in both datasets to be substantial. I could be wrong, and I mean that without any of the performative humility that tends to accompany statements of this kind. A pilot designed to test a hypothesis has to be capable of disproving it, and mine is. If the data shows that PRS’s catalogue assumption is broadly accurate and that the distribution methodology is sending the royalties to the right people, I will say so clearly, and I will be genuinely relieved to have spent nine years worrying about something that turned out to be fine. The other party to this argument has never, in nine years, publicly demonstrated the same willingness. I note that without rancour. It is simply a fact about how the conversation has been conducted.
When the pilot concludes, the findings will be published in full. Methodology transparent. Numbers open. If PRS wants to engage with the data before publication, that conversation has been available for nine years and remains so.
The venues in this sample include rooms you have played, rooms you have watched bands in, rooms where someone is performing their own songs tonight to an audience that paid to be there, while a royalty is collected in their name that there is a very, VERY high possibility they will never see.
We are about to find out how often that happens.
And there we go. Fantastic. 🙌🏼
This is an (another) excellent article and piece of research. But can I also suggest there is a wider problem. MVT’s interests seem to me to largely focus on what we call rock music, and nothing wrong with that. But there are also a lot of small promoters/venues operating weekly or monthly in other musical fields, including Folk and Jazz and possibly Blues. I have been promoting Jazz for 50 years and currently run two Jazz Festivals. The Festival I run that is ticketed gets billed by PRS each year. Does that money find its way back to the Jazz musicians we book? a) I simply don’t know and b) I am highly doubtful it does. Jazz musicians have a slightly different career profile to rock musicians. They will never be stadium fillers. They spend their lives working in the bands of more famous musicians – the exceptional Jazz trumpeter Mark Kavuma can be seen in Raye’s horn section – or they play a large number ‘low level’ pub gigs that pay, but not exceptionally well. And some like bassist Dave Green and saxist Art Themen are still driving all over the country to do that in their eighties. Those small ‘pub venues’ are the equivalent of the venues that MVT is championing. Some might even be the same ones. Those venues will almost certainly be paying PRS Fees. Many Jazz musicians play ‘standards’ that are possibly out of copyright. But many also write their own material. And as they don’t have the earnings potential of a rock musicians who gets to stadium level or have a high profile on Spotify (another problem child), it can be argued that their earnings via PRS are even more important. So it would be great to see this excellent MVT/Audoo campaign extended into other specialist music fields. I can’t speak for Folk music where a lot of music may be out of copyright. But there’s a strong case for including Jazz venues and Jazz in this excellent piece of research.