PRS for Music

Paul McCartney performing live. Photo Credit: Jimmy Baikovicius

PRS for Music is facing another round of criticism – this time from Paul McCartney, Elton John, and Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke, who are calling out the entity’s admin costs.

Those professionals and 15 other well-known songwriters aired their expense-focused grievances in a letter last week. And the pushback – which follows a “black box” royalties claim against PRS from Blur drummer David Rowntree – just recently entered the media spotlight in a Bloomberg piece.

(Rowntree’s action is distinct from the Jesus and Mary Chain-filed complaint targeting PRS’ live performance admin rates and withdrawal terms.)

Not beating around the bush, the songwriter signatories emphasized their “growing concerns about the transparency, accuracy and overall representation of members’ interests.”

Following the idea to its logical conclusion, the same individuals touched on the possibility of employing technology to reduce reporting costs and, in turn, increase member payouts.

Responding to the letter, PRS said it’d already met with the songwriters’ reps – no word yet on how the talks played out – and stressed “the challenges of collecting data from hundreds of thousands of businesses and matching against millions of individual works to accurately pay royalties.”

On this front, many are aware of the inherent shortcomings associated with manually reporting public establishments’ song usages – an especially important point given that the data is then extrapolated for broader payment purposes.

Furthermore, not mentioned by Bloomberg is that Elton John in 2023 invested in Audoo. The London-based company’s Audio Meter, which plugs into any standard outlet, is said to accurately monitor and log actual usages – including from background music, live performances, and more.

Audoo and PRS announced an Audio Meter-powered partnership back in August 2023, or shortly before the former revealed John’s investment. But PRS is conspicuously absent from the Audoo website’s partners section.

PRS for Music didn’t respond to a request for comment in time for publishing. However, Audoo CEO Ryan Edwards reiterated his company’s “pilot projects” with PRS and emphasized the complexity of live and public performance reporting.

“We’re proud to have partnered with PRS for Music over the past five years to deliver pilot projects powered by our technology,” Edwards said to DMN. “These trials focused on Public Performance and Live reporting, two of the most complex areas of royalty data, and demonstrated how music usage can be captured and reported with greater accuracy.

“At Audoo, our mission is to champion transparency and accuracy through privacy-first data collection and reporting, empowering rights organisations and their members with the insights they deserve.

“We are here to support PRS for Music and rights organisations around the world as we continue to promote and enable fairness and trust across the music industry,” the Audoo head concluded.

Stateside, it was only earlier in 2025 that ASCAP voiced concerns – pertaining to “tracking reliability” and “guardrails to prevent fraud,” among different things – about tech-powered music monitoring. But logic and evidence suggest that some of these issues (on top of others) might already be plaguing the current approach.