UK Licensing
A strong year, with growth in revenue across all areas of UK licensing activity.
PPL’s UK licensing covers public performance, dubbing, broadcast and online activity.
Public performance and dubbing
Public performance revenue is the revenue collected for the playing of recorded music in public places such as shops, bars, restaurants, offices, gyms and hairdressers.
UK public performance revenue is collected via PPL PRS Ltd, the joint public performance venture with PRS for Music, which celebrated its fifth birthday in March 2023.
Public performance revenue continued to demonstrate a very strong post-Covid recovery, growing by 11% in 2023 to reach £111.7 million. This surpassed the pre-pandemic high and continues to demonstrate the value to businesses of investing in music as a driver of customer and employee engagement.
PPL’s dubbing activity, where it licenses a number of specialist companies to provide background music services and digital jukeboxes to venues across the UK, performed well.
In January 2023, a new Specially Featured Entertainment (SFE) tariff for public performance came into effect, following successful collaboration and negotiation with the industry bodies UKHospitality and the British Beer and Pub Association in settlement of a Copyright Tribunal reference. The new SFE tariff was designed to better recognise the value of members’ repertoire to discos, DJ events, pubs, bars, nightclubs, restaurants, cafes and hotels, and ensure more consistent reporting across licensees. Since its introduction, over 8,000 venues have transferred to the new tariff, and it has driven a positive impact for performers and recording rightsholders in its first year of operation.
Broadcast and online licensing
Broadcast revenue continued to increase in 2023 with revenue from the licensing of recorded music for radio, TV and online totalling £96.4 million, up from £94 million in 2022.
In 2023, PPL signed new agreements with a number of major broadcasters covering linear TV channels and services that are broadcast to the UK and throughout the world, as well as licensing their on-demand and catch-up services and the distribution of TV programmes internationally.
This included new deals with Discovery and S4C for their TV services, and the negotiation of a new long-term deal with the BBC for its public service activities across its broad range of radio and TV channels, and online, on the BBC Sounds app, and on the iPlayer.
The licence fee PPL collects for commercial radio is based on a percentage of radio station revenue, which was adversely impacted by a downturn in the advertising market in 2023. However, this sector showed signs of positive recovery towards the end of the year.
