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Performing Right Society |
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This article does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed. (June 2008) |
The Performing Right Society (often shortened to PRS), founded in 1914, is the collecting society for UK songwriters, composers and music publishers. Its role is to act as an agent for its members in order to collect performing royalties whenever their musical works are performed in public, broadcast or transmitted. In 1997 they formed an alliance with their sister company the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society (MCPS). PRS is a not-for-profit membership organisation with 60,000 songwriter, composer and music publisher members1. PRS members write every kind of music imaginable: rock, pop, folk, dance, electronic, r ‘n’ b, jazz, classical, film and TV music. There is an organisation like PRS in every country in the world – collecting the royalties that are due to composers and songwriters from the public performance of their music. When a piece of music is written, the writer of that music needs to give permission for that music to be publicly performed. International laws protect the author of a piece of music, who retains rights to the Intellectual Property they have created. In the UK, the latest revision of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act was in 1988. Composers and songwriters are small businesses. 90% of PRS members earn less than £5,000 a year in royalties. Royalties ensure composers and songwriters are paid in order to keep on creating. Royalties are vital to support the growing creative economy. PRS is an easy way for businesses that wish to use music to get the permission they need to do so from the creators of that music. Because PRS has reciprocal agreements with every other collecting society in the world, it is able to grant businesses access to the entire world repertoire. A PRS licence therefore gives a business unlimited access to 10 million songs – seven days a week, 52 weeks a year. Without organisations like PRS, businesses wishing to use music would have to get individual permissions for every piece of music they would ever want to play. There are 40 different tariffs that are available to businesses – depending on their size and the extent to which they are using music. Around 350,000 businesses have a PRS licence to play music. Once PRS has collected the licence fee from businesses playing music, it distributes that money back to the composers and songwriters who created it as closely as possible to the actual performances that music has received. PRS chooses not to license:
·in patient and treatment areas in hospitals
·medical day centres
·residential homes in most circumstances
·music used in divine worship
·civil wedding ceremonies and partnership ceremonies
·lone and home workers
PRS works in an operational Alliance with MCPS (the Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society) which specifically licenses those businesses which manufacture products containing music.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/humber/content/articles/2007/05/21/theknowledge_prs.shtml
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