CEO’s statement
Chief Executive Officer’s statement
In 2022, we achieved the highest total revenue in our 89-year history at £272.6 million, surpassing pre-pandemic levels with a year-on-year increase of 7.8% (£19.8 million).
PPL PRS Ltd, our joint venture public performance licensing company with PRS for Music, which celebrated its fifth anniversary in February this year, performed very well, with revenues for public performance and dubbing increasing by almost 40% year-on-year to £100.8 million. This follows two years during which public performance revenues were significantly affected by the impact of Covid-19, when many businesses that we license were closed.
Our UK licensing efforts continued to deliver positive growth in broadcast revenues, resulting from the licensing of recorded music for use on TV, radio and by webcasters. Increasing by 8.4% year-on-year to £94.0 million, this part of PPL’s business was boosted by new multi-year deals with major broadcasters including the BBC (for both its public service and commercial activities), ITV and Channel 4, and steady growth in advertising revenues from commercial radio. In our licensing of webcasters and live streaming, we extended our multi-territory licences with Sonos and Mixcloud Live and agreed a new deal with Polaroid for its multi-channel online radio service, covering seven territories.
International revenues, from the collection of royalties due to members when their music is played overseas, performed strongly, generating £77.8 million. With 109 agreements with CMOs across 49 countries for the collection of international royalties, we remain the global leader in neighbouring rights and focus each day on developing and strengthening direct relationships with our counterparts across the world to best serve PPL’s growing and diversifying membership.
These achievements were underpinned by our diligent approach to metadata management. We continued to seek to maximise our revenues through improvements to internal processes, investment in cutting-edge technologies, collaborations with stakeholders on critical projects such as Repertoire Data Exchange (RDx), and partnerships with allies such as Gracenote and Session.
Alongside our external-facing activity, we placed significant focus on cultivating a welcoming work environment for our 200+ team of employees. They are vital to the success of PPL’s operations and the change we want to drive across the wider industry. Last year saw the launch of PPL’s five-year equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) strategy, together with the publication of our gender and ethnicity pay gap reports. This is an area that I want PPL to lead on in our industry, and its implementation is a priority for the Executive Management Team.
In early 2023, we also launched our first sustainability strategy, following a full audit of our carbon footprint in 2022. PPL is committed to integrating environmental best practice into our operations and becoming net zero by 2050. This report highlights just a few of our activities and achievements, and it showcases the dedication of the whole PPL team to standing up for music rights and ensuring creators and recording rightsholders get paid. PPL continues to go from strength to strength and we are proud of what we accomplished last year. We hope you, our valued performer members, will join us in celebrating these achievements in our journey.
Peter Leathem OBE
CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER
