what is PRS?
PRS is a global music organisation that represents the rights of writers and publishers. There job is to make sure that the music is played live at concerts or on the radio and other platforms. PRS stands for the Performing Rights Society. PRS make sure that the members of their company get performing royalties, PRS work on a ‘not for a profit’ basis. Here are some examples of events where you can obtain PRS royalties; gigs, concerts, film and radio plays, films and adverts and downloads and streams. The members of PRS include; song writers, composers, successors, electric producers and music publishers. A lot of mainstream artists are members of PRS because of it’s worldwide reach some of these artists include; Dua Lipa, Stormzy and Ed Sheeran. All though these are well known names you don’t have to be a well known artist to join PRS, there are many plans ranging at different costs. One of the best ones for starting off is the ‘small gigs plan’, this is for when you are playing at bars or restaurants or similar venues to that. To do this plan all you need to do is obviously pay, pick a set list of song and have your gig when you can find one. Gigs with this plan pay £9 an hour.
Copyright
Copyright is the right to copy a certain brand, logo, song and etcetera. When you copyright something it is legally considered your property and will be treated like it, that means if your idea is copyrighted only you have the right to your image unless you give out licenses. But if someone copies your copyrighted music you can sue them and take them to court. The person who owns the copyright decides where the music is issued and who has the right to play it. You can tell if something is copyrighted by a small trademark logo beside the brand, song or logo.
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Music Rights
There are 2 main types of music rights first of all there is publishing rights. Publishing rights represent the song as a whole, if you have composed this song you will have this right by default. The other type of right is the master right this right is given to the person or company who funded or provided for the artist, an example of this would be if that person or company paid for the sound recording. A known company that specialises in master music rights is PPL.
Music Users
Music users such as the BBC uses a quarter of a million songs every week total on all of their platforms, each song that is played on their service. Every time one of these songs is played the artist will get payed, it is the same for other music users such as films, ads and even your hairdressers. Hair dressers need to pay for a licence to lay certain songs at their shop. Some other music users include; PlayStation, live venues, record labels, vinyl and Spotify.
