Why royalties for writers and performers are sacrosanct The money coming in as royalties from bodies like PRS and PPL has been keeping many musicians and composers afloat. Naomi Pohl asks how can we protect this income in the future and ensure that our members get paid? As I highlighted in my column in the last issue of The Musician on our #FixStreaming campaign, the Covid-19 crisis has demonstrated how vital royalties are to the livelihoods of performers and music writers. With the majority of work evaporating overnight, PRS and PPL royalty runs were eagerly anticipated by our members, and both collecting societies stepped up their distribution levels.
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PRS for Music also launched its Emergency Relief Fund, while PPL made significant donations to the MU Coronavirus Hardship Fund and Help Musicians UK. The MU played its part in setting up the Hardship Fund, and our Recording and Broadcasting Department focused solely on royalty collection and distribution while the studios were closed, leading to record distributions of over £500,000 to musicians in the first half of 2020. £23.9m of royalties were advanced to PPL members on 30 April, and CEO Peter Leathem commented: “PPL’s collections are an important revenue stream to tens of thousands of performers and recording rightsholders. In these difficult times, it is important that PPL is paying members even more regularly than usual. In addition to our March distribution of £87.6m and our recent financial pledges to industry hardship funds”, he added, “bringing forward part of the annual June payment to the end of April will provide further meaningful support for those in need”.
“There are many organisations exploiting our members’ rights who seek to undermine royalties either by resisting licensing or seeking buy-outs” The Musician • Autumn 2020
PRS for Music made a record £174m royalty distribution to its members at around the same time, marking the highest ever April payment in its history. This included a substantial increase in live performance payments as PRS staff prioritised processing and reduced the average turnaround time to three months. CEO Andrea C Martin said: “We hope that this record April PRS distribution, alongside our recently announced PRS Emergency Relief Fund, will help ease the burden felt by music creators due to Coronavirus. The entire PRS team is working hard to ensure that through this period of significant disruption – especially to live music and UK businesses – we do everything we can to minimise the risk to future distributions.” What’s to come? Future distributions will indeed be impacted by the closure of businesses, which have had their licence fee payments suspended this year. The outlook is far from certain and changing on a regular basis, but PPL currently expects that there could be a decline in UK revenue of up to 30% on 2019. International collections however are expected to remain relatively strong, although there is likely to be some impact in distributions made to PPL from other CMOs from 2021. PRS for Music predicts a 10% decrease in distributions for 2020 compared to 2019, and further reductions from 2021 onwards. This is set against forecasted declines in overall revenues of between 15%-25%, which take into account a fall in public performance revenue, international income, and a drop in TV and radio revenue caused by low advertising sales. Forecasts for
