PRS for Music has made a major change to the distribution of multi-territory online licensing (MTOL), meaning PRS members will now receive monthly royalty payments for online streaming.
These royalties will be paid faster and more often whenever members' work is used on services like Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music. Online streaming makes up a substantial portion of the royalties PRS distributes each year — in 2024, this amounted to 28.4% of the total royalties paid out by the organisation.
The news follows on from last year’s MTOL admin rate reduction, which will see an estimated £47m more being paid out to members by 2030.
Members will start receiving online streaming royalty payments from 15 August. These payments will adhere to PRS’s existing distribution process, where members with royalties due over £30 (UK) and £60 (overseas) receive payouts on the 15th of each month or the nearest date (except in October’s main distribution, when this lowers to £1 for members in the UK). Head over to the PRS website for a full list of payment dates.
To learn more about the benefits of monthly online streaming payments, M spoke to PRS for Music’s Director of Operational Improvement, Tim Arber.
Why is online streaming such an important part of the overall digital royalty landscape for PRS members?
‘Online streaming is the area of our business where royalties are generated from major global digital music services such as Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer and Tidal. This is a huge and — especially over recent years — rapidly expanding and important market for our members. As you would expect, it's an area through which their music can reach a huge audience across the globe.'
What’s made it possible for this change in distributions to take place now?
'A large volume of MTOL data enters our systems regularly, but for years we held it and paid online streaming royalties on a quarterly basis. We realised there may be an opportunity to get these royalties to members closer to when their performance took place and ease the flow of data. So earlier this year, we decided to pilot the release of any available MTOL royalties in our monthly distributions. It went well, and now we're able to include them in our monthly distributions where we can.
'To make this change, we put a huge amount of effort into quality checking and assurance around all our distributions to validate that everything we're going to pay out is as complete and accurate as it can be. We worked with our data teams to evolve and update our internal dashboards so that we can service and validate monthly views of data.’
'Online streaming is an important and rapidly expanding market for PRS members.' - Tim Arber
What are the most immediate benefits that members will notice with this change?
'While it doesn’t change the total amount of royalties, for many members it means they'll get their money sooner and more frequently. People want more frequent access to both the money and the information about what's played and when. Getting those things earlier on in the process is the real value — they get the money from those royalties, but they also get information and data that they can interrogate and understand when and where their work has been played.
‘If members generate enough royalties to exceed the regular payment threshold, and we’ve got online streaming data and money to distribute, they'll receive that in the month that it's available for us to pay, rather than having to wait for the next quarterly distribution.'
Can you talk us through how PRS is innovating and transforming the way we process copyright data through platforms such as ICE?
'There are wider industry benefits for ICE Cube in terms of creating a modernised and truly multi-territory database with a single view of the truth across multiple partners. In the MTOL space where different licensors are working with copyright and making claims, it's incredibly important to have complete, accurate and timely copyright pictures so that we can identify, claim and then pay the right members at the right time.
'ICE Cube will help us to deliver complete, accurate and timely distributions.’
Is this change in distribution part of a wider transformation in the way PRS think about data, royalties and how we serve members in a digital-first world?
'It is, and there's two ways of looking at this. In the context of pace and frequency, there’s a line of thinking here that we can leverage improvements in our technology, our processes and our data to get money to members sooner, while being sensitive that we need to make sure that that it’s in a way that works for our members and their processes. But that change is part of the major programme we're running, our end-to-end distribution programme, which is fundamentally about ensuring we continue to deliver a world-leading royalty distribution service, in a rapidly evolving music landscape.
‘Part of that is around what we can do to make sure that end-to-end distribution ecosystem is optimised for members. Whether that's by ensuring that we've got the best possible accuracy and completeness, about reducing the time from play to pay, increasing the transparency of our data, or making sure that we've got the scalability and the capacity that we need to deal with the changing industry we operate in.
‘We're seeing this huge expansion in the value of royalties that we're able to process and distribute, and the underlying volume of data that we need to provide to members so they can understand their payments. So, this online streaming royalties change is one part of a much broader review of our systems, processes, and member offering.’
