International revenue

PPL’s international revenues in 2022 reached £77.8 million, declining by £16.2 million on 2021. We saw revenue from past periods (i.e., monies related to airplay more than two years old) continue to make up a significant proportion of the international income collected. However, year-on-year, the proportion of revenue collected for past periods declined, due to the work undertaken by CMOs in speeding up their distribution paythrough.

With the collections market in Europe maturing, resulting in less historic money being paid out and an improved first-time paythrough rate, PPL is now focusing on further expanding into developing markets, ensuring that members benefit from the increasing reach of rights licensing for sound recordings and the development of centralised systems for data management, such as SoundSys. Our continued investment in adopting and using centralised CMO-developed industry tools, such as the Virtual Recordings Database (VRDB) and Repertoire Data Exchange (RDx), is helping to generate greater returns for performers and recording rightsholders respectively.

Working alongside global trade bodies, IFPI (for recording rightsholders) and SCAPR (for performers), we continue to advocate for the use of standard identifiers to help with data quality, the extension of sound recording rights in new territories around the world and the adoption of best practice in licensing.

Supporting our fellow CMOs

An important strategic area of operations for PPL is our Business Services offering, which allows other CMOs to use our pioneering technology to calculate or distribute royalties more accurately. In March 2022, SFH, Iceland’s neighbouring rights CMO for performers and recording rightsholders, signed a five-year deal for our Business Services support. In October 2022, LaIPA, Latvia’s neighbouring rights CMO for performers and recording rightsholders, signed a new rolling contract to provide matching, rightsholder identification, and reporting services.

As part of our Business Services relationship with PPI (Ireland), we also delivered a new distribution calculation service to support the first-ever payment to performers of Irish Supplementary Remuneration (SR) relating to the extension of copyright terms for sound recordings. This development saw PPL calculate and report SR distributions to 14,000 session musicians who performed on recordings released between 1963 and 1970.

We now deliver Business Services to eight CMOs around the world in Estonia, Jamaica, Lithuania, Portugal and Switzerland, as well as those listed above.

International revenue by country