Vince Power Ban Set Aside

PRS had said that between 2009 and 2012 the promoter ran his Hop Farm festivals in Kent without proper music licenses. As part of the new High Court ruling, PRS has accepted the original injunction and costs awarded are now dismissed.

“PRS wrongly claimed that Hop Farm did not have copyright to play live music at the events between 2009 and 2012,” read a statement released on Power’s behalf. “PRS also wrongly claimed that it had obtained an injunction banning Vince from staging musical events. It had not – the order simply required him to pay licence fees in order to stage events and that is the law anyway.”

Power says he didn’t receive notification of PRS For Music’s intended litigation, a point he made at the time of the original hearing in the summer. At the time he also claimed that any money outstanding to PRS for the years in question should have been paid by the administrators for Power’s Music Festivals Plc. company, which went into administration in October 2012.

Sluggish ticket sales at Spain’s Benicassim Festival and the UK’s Hop Farm Festival had his publicly traded Music Festivals issuing a profit warning and beginning a search for more cash.

The firm originally raised £6.5 million by floating on the Alternative Investment Market in July 2011, but a year later stock bought for 65p a share had dropped to 42.5 pence.

Power told the New Musical Express the PRS case was “vindictive” and the amounts owed were “peanuts” compared with what he’d paid to PRS in the past.

The outstanding amount is said to be less than £8,000. Hop Farm festivals have continued amid more controversy. A 2013 event run by Power was canceled, while this year another promoter ran an event with the same name on the same site.

Power claimed his event had been “hijacked.” The so-called hijacker had no better luck, as Hop Farm Music Festival Ltd. – which ran the 2014 gathering – went into liquidation in September.