UK collecting society PRS for Music distributed £239m (around $288.7m at current exchange rates) of royalties in its latest quarterly distribution.
The society hailed this as “the largest single royalty payment in its 109-year history”, adding that more than 4,000 of its members received their first royalty payments as part of it.
PRS also pointed to a previous promise by CEO Andrea Czapary Martin that the society would be distributing more than £1bn of royalties annually by 2026.
A single quarterly payment of £239m does suggest that PRS for Music is well on the way to hitting (or likely exceeding) her target.
The news follows a 2022 when PRS for Music’s payouts grew by 23.5% year-on-year, as its collections continued to recover from the initial hit of the Covid-19 pandemic, accompanied by strong digital growth.
Those trends were also reflected this week in the annual report of global collecting societies body Cisac, which revealed a global rise in collections of 28% last year.
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