CEO’s statement

Peter Leathem OBE

Chief Executive Officer’s statement

I am delighted, once again, to present an impressive set of results for PPL. 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).

This is testament to the dedication of our employees and the quality of our partnerships and industry relationships both in the UK and around the world.

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.

Delivering positive growth in broadcast revenues

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.