This is the third in a four-part series on PRS for Music and the grassroots music sector. Part one explained what PRS is and why its approach to grassroots venues is structurally broken and you can read that HERE. Part two, published on Tuesday, you can read HERE. It quantified the money that does not reach the songwriters it was collected for; somewhere between 18 million pounds on the most conservative possible reading, and 25.5 million on the figures that are substantially more likely to be correct, spread across three years. Over 6 million pounds a year being transferred from the grassroots to the most successful songs, songwriters, publishers. This piece explains the mechanism. How the overcharging works, why it went undetected for so long, what PRS knew and when, and why, even now that the evidence is on the table, nothing has changed.
There is a fact at the centre of this story that needs to be stated plainly before we go any further. In 2017, during a formal review of its tariff for live music venues, PRS for Music accepted Music Venue Trust position that its licensing model did not reflect the reality of music performed in grassroots venues and that therefore the grassroots sector could not agree to the proposed changes to Tariff LP. PRS for Music, to acquire the agreement of the grassroots sector, agreed that change was needed. To achieve settlement of the last review of Tariff LP, PRS for Music agreed to deliver that change, formally issuing a letter committing to deliver it. For the avoidance of any doubt as to the existence of that letter and what PRS for Music committed to deliver, for the first time ever I have made that letter public and you can read it HERE.
In the nine years since PRS for Music issued that letter, no change has been delivered. Not a revised tariff. Not a reformed methodology. Not a modified assumption. Nothing. The model that PRS acknowledged in 2017 to be inaccurate is the model it still applies in 2026, unchanged, to every grassroots venue in the country. There was no review, as promised in the letter. There was no new tools brought forward, no adoption of digital process, no realignment of responsibility. No assessment ever took place of progress by September 2019, as specifically promised within the letter, because none was achieved or attempted.
Everything that follows should be read in the light of that fact. People will say (and, in fact, have already said following the publication of parts 1 and 2) that I shouldn’t be writing these columns exposing all the nuances of what is happening in the grassroots sector as a result of PRS for Music processes. They say that issues like this need to be dealt with away from the glare of publicity and public debate. To those people I would ask “What do you think we have been doing for the last nine years?” How long is the sector expected to continue to conduct this discussion privately with no movement at all to change it, even nine years after there was an explicit agreement that it must be changed? Should we perhaps have waited for a big 10 year anniversary of inaction? Thrown a tenth anniversary party to celebrate that at least 60 million pounds has been taken from the grassroots and distributed upwards through the music ecosystem to people and companies that are already successful?
For most of the history of this problem, dating all the way back to 1988, grassroots music venues did not know they were being overcharged. They received a bill from PRS, they had no realistic basis on which to challenge it, and they paid it. This was not naivety or passivity. It was the entirely rational response of small businesses operating on thin margins without specialist legal or rights management expertise, facing an aggressive and highly litigious statutory monopoly with no obligation to explain its methodology, no desire for transparency, and no accessible mechanism for dispute.
The structural conditions that produce overcharging are the same conditions that prevent it from being detected. A venue running four shows a week, paying its bills, surviving on margins where the sector average is 2.5% and where 53% of venues make no profit at all; that venue does not have a rights management department. It does not have a lawyer who understands copyright tariff structures. It does not have time to cross-reference PRS invoices against repertoire databases or to request and scrutinise the methodology behind its licence calculation. It has a gig to run and artists to pay.
This lack of data and evidence changed when MVT appointed a dedicated Rights Management lead; someone whose specific job was to sit inside this system, understand how it worked, build the expertise to interrogate it, and give venues the tools to push back. Full reveal - we appointed someone who understood the PRS machine inside out, a gamekeeper turned poacher. Or perhaps the other way around.
Before that appointment, the sector, as a general collective, was effectively defenceless. Not because the overcharging was hidden by PRS in any active sense, but because understanding it required a level of sustained, specialist engagement that the vast majority of individual venues could not sustain and no collective body had previously resourced. The problem did not grow when MVT started looking, it was already there. MVT simply built the tools to see it and to be able to assess the damage it was doing across a whole sector rather than the damage it was doing to one individual venue, promoter, artist or songwriter.
Once that work began, the picture that rapidly emerged was striking. Dispute after dispute, across venue after venue, revealed a consistent pattern. The bills were wrong. Not occasionally wrong, not wrong at the edges, but systematically and substantially wrong; overcharging by an average of 166%, in some cases by more than 200%. Forty-one disputes were fully resolved in the first few months of this work, each one representing a venue that was overcharged, challenged its bill with MVT support, and received a correction from PRS. The average overcharge across those 41 cases was just under 6,000 pounds per venue per year.
Think about what that figure represents in the context of a sector where the average net profit margin is 2.5% and where 53% of venues return no profit at all. A venue turning over 500,000 pounds a year and achieving the sector average generates net profit of around 12,500 pounds. An annual overcharge of 6,000 pounds does not eliminate that margin entirely, but it removes nearly half of it from an operation that in all likelihood already has nothing left for reinvestment, maintenance, or reserve. For the majority of venues, the ones in the 53% that make no profit at all, an overcharge of this scale is not an administrative inconvenience. It is, in the most direct sense, money the venue does not have. It is, for many, a key contributing factor in a decision to close. And to clarify; this £6,000 over charge is not money that won’t be paid to songwriters by any of the other challenges we are discussing in these articles. It is money that should never have been charged by PRS for Music as the claim they made that it was owed was simply false.
PRS operates two distinct tariffs relevant to grassroots music venues, and understanding the difference between them is essential to understanding why the problem has the shape it does.
Tariff LP covers venues that host live performances on a regular basis; the consistently-used end of the grassroots sector, venues with consistent programming and an established relationship with PRS. The licence fee under Tariff LP is calculated on ticket sales, pure and simple. PRS does collect some usage data under this tariff; setlists are demanded for events, which in theory allows royalties to be routed toward the appropriate writers if those setlists are delivered. Reality hits hard at this point, as in practice, as part two of this series established, around 50% of Tariff LP events have sufficient data for distribution. The other half contributes to the undistributed pool. Why? Because PRS for Music have decided that the best way to get that setlist information is to make it the responsibility of the venue to provide it. Not the artist, who might actually know what was played, or the promoter, who might know what was played and how many tickets were sold, or the ticketing company, who might at least be able to provide accurate details about the number of people in the room and what they paid. No, they have created the terms and conditions of Tariff LP so that the venue operator will be expected to miraculously know the names of the songs played, write them all down, and send them off to PRS HQ. With a guess at how many tickets the promoters sold. And, wait for it because you couldn’t make this up, if the venue operator doesn’t do that the fee for Tariff LP rises from 4% to 4.2%.
Tariff LP probably sounds like a terrible mechanism for getting grassroots songwriters paid already, but it does have one major thing going for it when it comes to collecting royalties and distributing them; it is, at least, not Tariff P.
Tariff P, in the grassroots sector, covers a huge swathe of what might be described as ‘start-up’ live music events; local bands, open mic nights, unsigned band showcases, jazz residencies, acoustic sets. It particularly covers the entry level, lower-capacity, higher-frequency end of the sector. Under Tariff P, PRS collects no usage data whatsoever from the venue hosting the event. Or from the promoter, or from the ticketing company. No setlists are requested or required. No sampling is conducted. The blanket fee is charged, the money is collected, and the question of whose music was performed is left open unless a songwriter knows their work has been performed, is registered as a PRS member, and makes a claim within one year of the event.
This is not an oversight. It is the design. PRS position is that Tariff P events are too small and too numerous to justify the administrative cost of data collection, and that the money will instead be distributed using a methodology based on larger events. In plain terms; the money is collected from small venues on the basis that music was performed, then distributed to writers based on what was performed at big venues. The small venues are the source of the funds. Activity at the big venues, or even on the radio, determine who receives them.
Both tariffs rest on the same foundational assumption; that every song performed at every licensed event falls within PRS repertoire. This is the 100% repertoire assumption, and it is where the overcharging originates.
MVT analysis estimates that somewhere between 20% and 34% of music performed at grassroots venues is legitimately within PRS repertoire. The majority of performers, and the majority of songs they perform, are unsigned and not PRS members. Many of the works they perform are unregistered, unreleased, or owned independently. Some material is in the public domain. Some involves improvisation that cannot by definition be registered. The 100% assumption ignores all of this. PRS calculates its fee as though it controls the entire evening, every night, at every venue.
If you charge for 100% of something you are entitled to collect for roughly a third of, you are overcharging by approximately 200%. The 166% average in MVT dispute data sits precisely where the analysis would predict it to sit.
The 41 disputes resolved early in this new era of scrutiny are a small fraction of the overcharging that has now been exposed across the sector. They were the easy cases where MVT was able to provide direct support, where the evidence was clear, and where the overcharge was large enough to make the process immediately worthwhile. And they represent less than one third of the total cases now settled and are little more than the tip of an iceberg of the whole issue. How many cases and how much money? Over 100 cases so far and more than £650,000 in over charging. Again, you can do the maths. If 100 cases settled has resulted in the identification of over £650,000 in over charging, you don’t need a degree in advanced calculus to immediately understand that we are talking about millions of pounds in unjustified charges across 800 venues every year.
For any venues who have not yet accessed that specialised MVT support, the structural barriers remain formidable. To challenge a PRS bill, a venue must demonstrate that the 100% assumption does not apply to its specific programming; documenting every work performed, establishing songwriter membership status, verifying registration in PRS catalogue, and presenting the case in a form PRS will accept. In terms of PRS licensing, a venue is guilty of using the PRS catalogue unless it can demonstrate that it is innocent. And direct experience demonstrates that any venue that does successfully do that will not actually see any reduction in the financial demand from PRS for Music - even when a venue proves it is not guilty, PRS defaults to assuming that it is. For a venue running four shows a week with minimal administrative capacity, the work required to prove this is not feasible for even one show, let alone hundreds. There is no independent, low-cost dispute resolution mechanism. The Copyright Tribunal, which is technically available, is slow, expensive, and designed for disputes at a scale most grassroots venues cannot afford to pursue.
The model is self-protecting. The conditions that make overcharging possible are the same conditions that prevent it from being contested; a very well-financed, huge Goliath with limitless access to funding to support its perceived legal position versus a literally David. Only someone has hidden their slingshot. Even with specialist MVT support in the room, the process is slow, resource-intensive, and dependent on venues having the stamina to pursue it.
The 2017 agreement between PRS and MVT is the hinge on which this entire story turns. PRS sat across the table from MVT, reviewed the evidence, and conceded the argument. They wanted to get an agreement on Tariff LP that they could apply to the whole music industry, and to get that they accepted that their licensing model for grassroots venues was based on an inaccurate assumption. It agreed to develop a new approach. That commitment was made formally, in the context of a structured tariff review, by people with the authority to make it. In the nine years since, nothing has happened, except that every single employee of PRS for Music that negotiated and signed that agreement no longer works there.
That agreement for change made in 2017 was not intended to be a pilot. Not a consultation. Not a revised methodology. Not an adjusted tariff. The venues that were overcharged in 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025 were overcharged on a model that PRS had already accepted was wrong. The money that entered the undistributed pool during those years did so under a collection framework PRS had formally acknowledged was flawed. The three-year redistribution clock that has been running on that unattributed money has been ticking throughout a period in which PRS was, by its own prior admission, collecting it incorrectly.
It is worth pausing here to note that the problem being described is not inherent to collective rights management. It is specific to how PRS has chosen to operate. Spain's equivalent body, SGAE, runs a tariff structure for concerts at venues under 1,000 capacity that offers organisers a formal choice between a percentage of box office or a fixed flat rate, whichever works out lower for them, exercised at the point of advance notification. If the night plays to a smaller crowd than expected, the promoter is not penalised for the gap between capacity and turnout. More relevantly, if a show features music that is not in SGAE's catalogue, the organiser can declare those works in advance and pay a proportional tariff covering only the works SGAE actually represents. The mechanism that PRS has spent nine years declining to implement, charging venues only for the music it legitimately controls, is live and functioning in Spain. It was not invented as a theoretical reform. It exists. Spanish venues under 1,000 capacity also receive a 10% discount on the percentage tariff and a further 5% for membership of a recognised sector body. Let’s be specific about this; SGAE have specifically recognised that it needs to run a different tariff structure, both collection and rate, to recognised that grassroots music venues in Spain are a different and unique part of the music ecosystem that require a different and unique approach to the collection of songwriter royalties. None of these provisions exist in PRS's tariff structure for the equivalent venues in the UK.
There is a saying in Spain that ‘España es diferente’ - Spain is different. But it’s not just Spain that has taken action to address overcharging and undistributed income. France’s equivalent body, SACEM, takes a different approach entirely to money it cannot distribute to specific rightsholders. Rather than redirecting it upward through a proxy methodology based on what plays at arenas and on the radio, SACEM reinvests it directly into the music ecosystem. In 2024 alone it allocated over twenty million euros to more than 3,600 cultural projects across France, including direct financial support for 1,200 concerts in smaller venues and municipalities, 478 festivals, and 185 performance spaces. The money collected from the grassroots end of French music culture flows back into it. The contrast with PRS’s approach requires no dramatic elaboration from me, it’s simply worth noting that PRS for Music already has in place an organisation by which it could take this very simple step, PRS Foundation, and its failure to identify that organisation as a better place to place undistributed funds taken from the grassroots is telling about its own internal power structures and battles.
PRS will point out that SGAE's headline tariff rate is higher than its own, or perhaps might opt to create its own saying that ‘France is different’, and on that narrow comparison they are correct. But those comparisons miss the point entirely. The question is not what percentage appears at the top of a tariff document, that’s a matter to be settled with a frank and honest discussion between artists, musicians, performers, and songwriters - there is, to return to the cake analogy earlier in this series, an amount of cake for the creatives involved. How they wish to split that cake is an interesting debate, who gets what percentage, but it is not the issue being discussed here. Nor does it answer what PRS for Music choose to do with money they simply should not have. This question is whether the collections system operated by the Performing Rights Organisation charges venues for music it actually controls, at a rate that reflects what was actually performed, with mechanisms to correct for the gap between assumption and reality, and what it does with any money it should not have collected. SGAE in Spain and SACEM in France have built those mechanisms. PRS has not. More bluntly, it has specifically chosen not to, despite committing in writing to doing it and despite what has happened in the intervening nine years since they signed up to do it.
Because what makes this inaction and lack of will to improve the system more remarkable still is that the MVT Rights Management work did not just produce dispute resolution. It produced data. Real, specific, granular data on what is actually performed at grassroots venues, how PRS billing compares to legitimate entitlement, and the scale of the gap between collection and distribution. That data has been presented to PRS. It has been presented to parliamentary committees. It now forms the evidential basis for a formal submission to the Business and Trade Select Committee calling for a CMA investigation and mandatory tariff reform.
PRS response to all of this has been to continue collecting on the 100% assumption.
There is a particular quality to that immobility worth naming. It is not the immobility of an organisation that does not understand the problem. PRS understands the problem; it accepted the diagnosis nine years ago. It is not the immobility of an organisation lacking data; the data has been put in front of it repeatedly and at increasing levels of specificity. It is the immobility of an organisation that has calculated, whether explicitly or implicitly, that the cost of changing the model is less than the cost of defending it. Bluntly, in a billion pound turnover organisation, the 6 million a year error in collection and distribution at the grassroots isn’t worth worrying about.
That calculation may have made a certain institutional sense for a long time. The sector lacked the tools to demonstrate the scale of the problem. Individual venues lacked the capacity to mount effective challenges. The overcharging was real but diffuse, distributed across hundreds of small businesses in amounts that were devastating locally but invisible nationally.
What has changed is that the tools now exist. The data now exists. The evidence is now in front of regulators, parliamentarians, and the public. The defence that the problem was unknown is no longer available to PRS. And the defence that the sector had not made its case is no longer reasonable either.
Part four, published on Sunday 12 April, sets out what reform looks like, names the institutions with the power to deliver it, and makes the case that the technology to fix the data collection problem has existed for years and is already being used by PRS for everything except the one area where it is most needed.
This argument has already been won. The remaining question is why winning it has not been enough.
I bet that back in 2017 they thought that MVT were just going to, at some point, ‘go away’. Far from it! MVT has, and continues to be, the proverbial ‘dog with a bone’ and it has now got to the stage where investigations are to take place. Really hope they follow the money trail whilst doing this.
This 3rd part is a real eye opener and the David and Goliath analogy is something that we see in corporatism across the world. A quick search shows PRS paid out £1.02 BILLION in royalties in 2024! It seems that they have bigger fish to fry internally but could we see the investigation unearth similar poor practices further up the chain?
Keep gnawing away at that bone Mark and team🙏👍
One way or another, this fraudulent behaviour, because that is what it is, should find its way to a court. They are quite deliberately defrauding venues and artists by taking money they are clearly not entitled to and sending it to artists that are also not entitled to it, while taking a cut.
If they feel the amounts are too small to correct, then the task should be removed from them and a different body set up to do it.