PRS for Music

And of course, in those days, Applications required quite a lot of knowledge of the underlying computer as well, so we had to spend quite a lot of time looking into that.

When I left college, I spent two years at the Performing Rights Society, which is the body that administers royalties for composers when they get performances and they actually get paid.

And they had the biggest physical card index I've ever seen.

Wow.

ASCAP and BMI don't touch mechanicals.

It's like a really important point that just because you are signed up to ASCAP or BMI, or if you're listening to this overseas and you're signed up to PRS or So Can in Canada or whatever, it's These organizations do not touch mechanical royalties, which are different types of royalties than what your PRO collects, which are called performance royalties.

Now, streaming, they will send a bunch of the money to your distributor if you're an artist.

That's like the bulk amount of that money goes to the artists and the labels, and that's through the distributor.

Because I've seen a couple of guys, you know, in the last two days posting stuff on those statements, saying, hey, someone paid me one rent something.

It's like, but when you look there, when it says society, you will see like for the one gent, I saw it, it said PRS, right? PRS is...

The CMO in the UK.

So if you look there, you will find that that's the case.

It was very much to remind us what an amazing job the BBC do and how vital they are to British culture and global culture, how vital they are to bands breaking through, artists breaking through.

The PRS music data shows that they played 140,000 unique works, of which 77% were not played on commercial radio.

So that's the sort of big stat that I think matters is that those songs are not getting heard anywhere else.

They're not getting played on commercial radio.

So you are really doing what I would call high-level hobnobbing.

Yeah.

I mean, Tuesday I went to a PRS event about AI and how AI is going to affect our industry.

I mean, we've talked about it at length.

The upside of it is, and this is an interesting one.

If you write the songs that you're singing, you will get 4% back because every venue has to pay something called PRS, right? So the Performing Rights Society, you have to pay them and literally write a list of every song that you sang that night.

And 4% of all ticket sales go to the writers of that song.

So if you're Noel Gallagher and you've written every single song on the Oasis tour, you will get 4% back.

I think songwriters get less money than everybody else, less money than the artist, less money than the record company.

And I've always thought, and when I was PRS chairman, I always said the same thing, "Without the song, there is nothing." You can make the best produced record in the world with the most best musicians, if there's no song there, it won't be a hit.

And I've also said that everything's got a hook, even like Maninoff, everything has a hook, and it could be anything.

Could be a rhythm, could be a violin solo, doesn't matter.

There's always a hook.

So, and I've done a lot of, I went round, I f- I got very friendly with a, a girl that was running the Barbados, the Bajan C- Collection Society, same as PRS obviously, and I helped her with her website, and I had an Idiot's Guide to a Publishing Contract.

And then about three weeks later, she's back in Barbados, and she rings up.

She said, "Look, if I fly you to Barbados and put you in a hotel, how much will you charge me to do a seminar on copyright?" I said, "Look, if you fly me to Barbados and put me in a hotel, I won't charge you anything." [laughs] The next thing that happens is I get a phone call from St.

Yeah, of course.

Performing Right Society.

But when you listen to it now, it's all music on the early keyboards and-

Yeah

Tarzan Economics, as in you have to let go of the old vine before you can grab the new one.

And I'm the former chief economist of the Performing Rights Society, the equivalent of ASCAP or BMI in the United States, and then Spotify, a very famous Swedish music streaming service.

And what did it mean to be chief economist at Spotify?

So you would go from commercial negotiations work, willing buyer, willing seller, trying to establish a trade between labels, publishers, telco deals, um, right the way across to artist work, artists who are furious at Spotify, who need to be convinced about the merits of the model in its early days to join the platform.

was

the first time you got paid for it when i was like 16 i was in college um and i got I got a radio play, and I remember my tutors saying, oh, you should sign up for PRS, Performing Rights Society.

And, yeah, I got played on BBC Radio Wales.

And then I think I got over 200 quid for one play.