PRS Royalties Up By A Third

Groundbreaking deals with sites including YouTube and a booming live music industry will see composers and songwriters receive record royalty payouts from their songs being used online, in pubs and on stage.

The Performing Right Society, which collects and pays royalties to composers, songwriters and music publishers, is distributing £110 million ($219.3 million) for the first quarter of 2008, up by more than a third on Q1 2007.

Following licensing deals last year with the video-sharing phenomenon YouTube and other social networking Web sites, PRS is now collecting when songs – originals or covers by amateur video uploaders – are played online. Revenues from the live music industry almost doubled from a year ago.

To collect the money and send out the cheques, PRS analysed the use of 650,000 songs played a total of 16.5 million times during the quarter.

Steve Porter, chief executive of the MCPS-PRS Alliance of collecting societies, predicts payouts for the whole year will rise by about 6.5 percent on the £370 million (US$738 million) paid out in 2007.