TV royalties
We pay royalties for the use of our members' music on TV through licensing agreements with broadcasters, including the BBC, Sky, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5.
How we calculate TV royalty rates
To track what’s played and when, we use two methods:
- Pay-per-play
- Representative samples
For both, the value of each play is dependent on the annual revenue received from each channel, the amount of music being played on each channel for the year and the length of time your work is used for.
Step 1
Firstly, we work out how much music each station plays over the course of an average day.Step 2
Then we look at how much of the music played falls within non-peak (midnight to 4pm), low peak (4pm to 6pm and 11pm to midnight) and high peak (6pm to 11pm) time of day bands.Step 3
We now apply weightings to the three time of day bands:
- A x1 per minute rate is applied to band one’s value (non peak)
- A x2 per minute rate is applied to create band two’s value (low peak)
- A x3 per minute rate is applied to create band three’s value (high peak)
Step 4
To determine a station’s royalty rates at different times of day we do the following:- For non-peak, we divide the station’s revenue by its total number of weighted music minutes.
- To create the low peak royalty rate value, we multiply the non-peak figure by a factor of two.
- To create the high peak royalty rate value, we multiply the non-peak figure by a factor of three.
TV streaming platforms
Unlike traditional broadcast channels, there are too many variables for us to be able to accurately calculate rates for TV streaming platforms. Before paying out, services like Netflix and Amazon Prime consider the popularity of a programme, money generated from subscribers during that period and the amount of music used across all programmes during the same period. Any guide rates provided by PRS would therefore be misleading.
TV rate checker
Check the per-minute royalty rates that apply to distributions from TV broadcasters.
