This is the second in a four-part series on PRS for Music and the grassroots music sector. Part one, published on Sunday, set out the basics; what PRS is, what it does well, and why its approach to grassroots venues is structurally broken. If you have already read that, or you already had a good understanding of some of the issues created by PRS for Music’s tariffs and methodology in the grassroots, then plough on with this next instalment. If not, it’s probably worth visiting that article first at this link.
This piece looks at the money. Specifically at where it goes when it does not reach the songwriters it was collected for, and how large that sum actually is. For the sake of this piece, I am going to be extraordinarily, outrageously generous to PRS in how I present these numbers. Not because there is any doubt about them, but to save arguments about minor percentages either way in their own information and the information that is available elsewhere in the public domain. Even after making those allowances, what remains is very difficult, and frankly almost impossible, to defend.
PRS for Music lacks any form of transparency that might enable anyone to state with a high-level of confidence that data in articles such as these can ever be 100% accurate. It will not publish a list of writers it represents, will not publish setlists, or show data, or sums accrued with any detail, or provide any transparency on what it does, in detail, with the money it collects. But occasionally it does let some data slip out, and what it tells us can be revealing of the size and scale of the challenges in the grassroots sector. So let’s pick one piece of data that comes direct from PRS for Music, dissect it, and see what it tells us.
PRS for Music publishes a dataset each quarter called the Pop Concerts Available for Distribution (‘PCAD’) list. Its quite hard to find on their website, so to make it easy for everyone to access the data I am going to discuss here I have republished the latest available version it and you can access it yourself HERE. What it contains is a record of every live music event for which PRS was aware of what an event contained in terms of performers, location and date, where PRS has collected a licence fee derived from Tariff LP, but has not yet been able to distribute the royalties to any rightsholder. A reminder; there are two Tariffs, P and LP. Tariff LP is the one on which PRS for Music makes its best attempt to match usage to songwriter and distribute accurately in the grassroots sector. PCAD is a list of shows where the venue paid, PRS collected, and nobody received. It is one of the only points of data which PRS release which can be checked, verified and analysed. So let’s do that.
The Q4 2025 edition of this list runs to 117,872 entries. Some of those entries are from shows that happened in late 2025, where distribution is still in process and the delay is unremarkable. These are marked ‘New’ on this list. Many others are not recent at all. Events from December 2018 appear in this dataset. Over seven years of money, collected from venues, matched to a specific show in a specific place, on a specific date, still not distributed to a single songwriter by early 2026.
I cross-referenced this dataset against the membership list of 800+ grassroots music venues held by Music Venue Trust. The result was 38,307 matched events across 240 confirmed GMVs. That’s nearly a third of everything in the entire dataset. The grassroots sector, which represents a tiny fraction of all licence holders in the UK, accounts for 32.5% of PRS entire distribution backlog in Tariff LP.
The grassroots music venues in that backlog are not obscure. Vortex Jazz Club in London has 880 undistributed events, the oldest dating to December 2018. The Troubadour, also in London, has 760 events, nearly 60% of them predating 2022. Clwb Ifor Bach in Cardiff has 1,040 undistributed events going back to January 2019. Band on the Wall in Manchester has 836. Bedford Esquires has 717. These are some of the most respected grassroots spaces in the country, venues that have been respectfully paying their PRS licence fees diligently for years, and for whom the money they have paid in good faith, intending that songwriters would benefit, appears to be stuck somewhere between PRS collection and the writers it belongs to.
The value of those 38,307 events, calculated using PRS own value banding for the licence fees involved, and, again, I am afraid we have to work around the fact that PRS for Music will not simply publish how much money they are holding from these shows so we have to estimate it, is approximately 1.68 million pounds. These are the shows, places, and dates in which PRS for Music have enough information to publish this list. It represents a tiny fraction of the events actually taking place in the grassroots sector under Tariff LP, events where PRS for Music have the licence fee but do not even have the most basic record of who performed, what they played, or even what date the show took place on. Extrapolating this available data to the full 800+ grassroots music venue universe, assuming that these 240 named venues are representative of the sector as a whole, and/or that their events listed are representative of their programmes as a whole, the visible undistributed total would rise to around 6.1 million pounds. Again, a reminder; this is Tariff LP that PRS for Music use to accurately try to match usage royalty to songwriter, and not Tariff P where they don’t even try to pretend to do that.
Now let us be generous. Generously generous. Let us assume that this analysis contains significant errors; that the venue matching is imprecise, that the extrapolation overstates the picture, that the per-event valuations are too high, and that PRS is actively working through this backlog faster than the data suggests. We don’t have any reason to do that other than purely to demonstrate how big a problem this is, even in the unlikely event that every single factor that might limit the scale of the problem flowed in the direction of reducing the error being made by PRS for Music. Let us apply a margin of error so large it borders on the absurd; 30% on top of the normal range of statistical uncertainty. After that 30% discount, the visible undistributed figure across the full GMV sector would fall to approximately 4.3 million pounds. We will use that figure from here. Not because I believe it to be accurate; I do not. But because it is important to demonstrate that even after applying a discount that no serious analyst would consider justified, the problem does not magically go away. Why?
Because the visible backlog displayed in the PCAD data is only part of the picture, and not the largest part. The dataset only captures events where PRS has enough information to create an entry. That requires, at minimum, a record of what, where and who the event was. Without that basic information there is no event record, and without an event record the money collected for that show does not appear in this dataset at all. The money it generates for PRS for Music, however, does not disappear. It sits in a separate, undifferentiated pool with no attribution to any specific performance or writer.
Across the grassroots sector, roughly one in four shows generates a setlist. This reflects a simple operational reality; a venue running four shows a week, mostly with unsigned and emerging artists, does not have the administrative infrastructure to document every performance to PRS standard, an issue they have been told about many, many times across over a decade of engagement. Putting aside the basic reality that venues simply do not have the manpower to collect setlists, collate them, send them off to PRS for Music, a bigger and much simpler reality is at play: Many of the artists performing have never registered with PRS and have no reason or incentive to submit paperwork to an organisation that cannot make a payment to them. Because even if they followed that process any resulting payment will likely amount to a few pounds shared among several writers, vastly outweighing the £100 cost of becoming a member and the administrative burden of trying to get PRS for Music to pay out your money.
Three in four shows in the grassroots sector leave no trace in the distribution system. PRS has the money from those shows. It does not know who it belongs to and it makes no effort to find out.
Under PRS rules, unattributed money sits in this state for three years. After three years it is redistributed. It is not returned to the venues, nor held on behalf of the writers whose music generated it, but allocated to other rightsholders using a proxy methodology based on data from major concert series and radio airplay. The reasoning is that since PRS cannot identify whose music was performed at these grassroots shows, it will distribute the money in proportion to its members who receives royalties from the music it can identify. That means the money flows toward writers whose songs perform well in commercial contexts; the charts, the arenas, Radio 1. I’ve tried to avoid too much anecdotal comment that has come to me across the years of trying to resolve this issue, but on this one let me be specific; questioned about this transfer of wealth from the people it actually belongs to over to people who they explicitly know it does not belong to and have done nothing to earn it, a PRS staff member once told me “well, at least it is going to songwriters, even if its not the right ones.”
The songwriter who played that Bristol venue on a Wednesday night goes uncompensated. The songwriter whose work was used but was not in the room misses a small additional payment they did not even know existed. The mechanism, to be fair to PRS for Music, is not unusual; it is a pretty standard industry approach to undistributed income and has got significantly worse with the rise of streaming platforms. It is nonetheless, in the context of a sector where three quarters of shows leave no data trail, a systematic upward transfer of money from emerging writers to established ones.
When you apply these figures to the full 800+ grassroots music venue universe, the annual flow of unattributed grassroots licence fees into this three-year pool is approximately 6.5 million pounds. On a rolling basis, at any given moment the pool holds around 19.4 million pounds; collected from grassroots venues across three years, impossible to trace to the writers it came from, and heading eventually toward a distribution methodology that will give it to someone else.
Let us apply that same exaggerated, over the top, way outside any possible justification, 30% discount again. After stripping out 30% to account for every possible error, overestimate, and methodological imprecision, the three-year invisible pool shrinks to approximately 13.6 million pounds.
Add the discounted visible backlog of 4.3 million to the discounted invisible pool of 13.6 million, and the total sum of grassroots licence fees either awaiting correct distribution or permanently misallocated, after a 30% reduction applied twice, is approximately 17.9 million pounds.
To state that plainly; even after discounting every figure by 30% to account for every conceivable margin of error, after being so generous to this process as to be frankly absurd about it, the amount of money collected from grassroots music venues that has not reached the songwriters to whom it actually belongs amounts to somewhere in the region of 18 million pounds. At all times, on a rolling basis, year after year, constantly topped up by new, unknown, unsubstantiated, royalty collection.
On an annual basis, and again after applying the same 30% discount, the grassroots sector pays PRS approximately 6 million pounds in licence fees across its shows each year. Of that discounted figure, around 4.5 million is for shows that will never generate a setlist and will eventually be redistributed upward. That leaves, at best, around 1.5 million pounds a year with any realistic prospect of reaching the right songwriter; 25% of even the discounted total collected.
The undiscounted figures, which, trust me, you would be better served to believe to be the more accurate ones, tell a starker story. But the point of this exercise is not to land the biggest possible number. It is to demonstrate that even at the most conservative end of what the data could possibly support, even after applying a margin of error that no statistician would endorse, the problem remains substantial, structural, and well beyond the threshold of the merely administrative.
The grassroots sector pays. The money moves. After applying an incredibly unlikely 30% haircut, 18 million pounds of it is sitting in a fund that will eventually end up somewhere other than the songwriters it was collected for.
Part three, published on Thursday 9 April, confronts the most damaging single fact in this entire story. In 2017, PRS formally accepted that its model was wrong and agreed, in writing, to fix it. Nine years on, nothing has changed. That piece also explains in detail how the overcharging works and why the structural barriers to challenging it have kept the problem invisible for so long.
First of all I should disclose that I am a former CFO and COO of PRS for Music and currently advising Audoo, a company with an interest in fixing at least some of the problems that Mark has raised in his excellent article. Today's article from Mark focuses on the challenge of knowing what music has been played in our all important grass roots venues such that the right people get paid without undue delay. One reliable way of PRS understanding what music is being played is by asking venues to install one of Audoo's audio meters. Audoo's audio meter won't fix one of the problems that Mark raised in Part 1: the question of how the writers that are not registered with PRS or one of the affiliated societies gets paid, but it would fix the larger problem - knowing what music has been played in the first place. Looking forward to the next instalments and in particular to seeing whether Audoo gets a mention in Part 4 as a "reformer".
This is an issue I have often struggled with. Having a quick look at the list via the link, my band has 8 events contained in the list, going back to 2022. But I have submitted 40 events to PRS that show as 'submitted' but not 'sent for payment' on my PRS portal, dating back to 2019. I find the whole thing ridiculous, especially when my band has to cover the PRS fee for a show of our own music and then we have to hope we might get some of it back at some point.