PRS for Music extend partnership with Oracle

PRS for Music has announced an extension of its partnership with Oracle.

With this extension — which will see PRS move its royalty payment database to Oracle Exadata Database Service on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) — PRS will be able to further accelerate royalty payments to its 165,000 songwriter, composer and music publisher members.

PRS will become the first collecting society globally to migrate its data processing systems to OCI, providing enhanced scalability, superior performance, high availability, enterprise security and overall lower costs.

These factors were instrumental in the record-breaking £836 million in royalties that PRS paid out in 2022, a 23.5% increase on the previous year, plus a historical low 9.3% cost-to-income ratio.

27 trillion lines of music data were processed by PRS in 2021 alone, an increase of over 500% compared to 2017. The burgeoning growth in the popularity of music streaming services and video-on-demand platforms will continue to dramatically increase in the years ahead, and the volumes of data which must be processed to identify which works have been played will also grow.

PRS's use of the Oracle Exadata Database Service on OCI will further guarantee that the correct music creators and publishers will be paid the royalties they are due, which is the core of PRS’s purpose. It also means that online scaling of resources will enable PRS to quickly adjust consumption to match demand without interrupting operations.

Leading with the Nexus programme, PRS is continuing to pioneer solutions to address the music industry’s data challenges. This partnership with Oracle is a key component in the transition from managing data to delivering insight and analysis through data science platforms and services.

Mark Krajewski, PRS for Music's Managing Director, Strategic Alliances and Chief Information Officer, said in a statement: 'Working with Oracle to migrate our distribution systems to the cloud was a seismic shift in infrastructure for PRS for Music, and a landmark moment in our industry. We are the only CMO in the world to have embraced this market-leading service. Exadata Database Service on OCI has been a catalyst for our ambitious data strategy, and with cutting-edge technologies in place we can continue to pioneer new activities to define the future of music royalty management. We have more control over our data than ever before, allowing for better data-driven decision making and greater speed, transparency, and accuracy in royalty distributions.

'Oracle Exadata Database Service on OCI ensures that we are able to process the tens of trillions of lines of data we receive and gives us the capacity to focus on developing new processes and policies. This combined with the work that we do at PRS for Music, resulted in our record-breaking financial results last year and the acceleration of our journey to becoming a society which pays out £1 billion in royalties annually.'

Nick Wallace, UK Cloud Leader at Oracle, added: 'Customers are dealing with more data than ever before, and this is increasing at a daily rate.

'By leveraging the Exadata Database Service on OCI, PRS for Music is in a position where it can meet the growing volumes of data to ensure it continues to deliver a seamless service to its customers.'