The other part of PRS' job is to pay the money collected in the form of royalties to the people whose music was played. With an estimated 7 billion public performances every year, the hard part is in calculating exactly who gets how much.
PRS makes a deduction from the royalties it collects in order to pay for the running of the organisation.
It's important to ensure a balance between accurate distribution of royalties and reasonable administration costs.
If PRS were paying hundreds of researchers to track down every single play of every single song in the UK , its administration charges would be so vast that the members would hardly get anything in the way of royalties.
So in order to maximise returns but at the same time ensure that the right music is paid for, PRS uses market research and statistical models to work out as closely as possible what music is being performed
Music reporting
In the case of the big licence fee payers such as the national BBC stations, the independent TV stations and larger commercial radio stations, PRS requests exact reports on all the music played and calculates royalty payments down to the last second of airtime.
When the licence fee becomes smaller, PRS has to take less information and use other methods to work out who to pay.
For example, Virgin Radio pay a large fee and so their report is analysed completely. A smaller commercial station pays a smaller fee but might use the same amount of music because they're still on air 24/7. In this case, it wouldn't be cost effective to do a complete analysis, so other methods must be used.
One method used is sampling. This is when a small sample of performance data is used to represent all the music performed.
In the case of the small commercial station above, PRS takes listings from a few random days a year and uses these as being representative of the station's entire output.
If your works are regularly being played on air, sampling like this will generate a pretty accurate picture and so the royalty payments are generally fair.
If your record is only played a couple of times, then it's less likely that the usage will be picked up.
If your plays don't land on days that PRS samples, it won't know that they happened and no royalty can be paid. This may seem a little unfair but it's the only practical, cost-effective method of coping with so much data.
PRS also use sampling in places like clubs. They'll take random nights and go through the DJs' set lists with them to establish a picture of the music that's being played around the country.
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