The David Rowntree Royalties Case

A collecting society like PRS licenses live performance. A venue pays, a promoter pays, a festival pays. The money comes in reliably.

The problem is what happens next. To pay a songwriter, the society needs to know which works were performed. That means a setlist, tied to registered works, tied to identified writers with documented splits. When any link in that chain is missing, the money arrives with no destination attached.

That unallocated pool is the black box. It isn't stolen and it isn't lost. It's money sitting in the system with no name on it.

In 2019 alone the unmatched pool from live performance ran to roughly £2.7 million, spread across more than 106,000 gigs — overwhelmingly at smaller grassroots venues, where setlist reporting is weakest and unregistered material is most common.

Rowntree didn't dispute that PRS collects the money. He challenged how it gets distributed once it can't be matched.

PRS allocates unmatched funds pro-rata by market share. In practice that means the writers who already earn the most from identified performances also take the largest slice of the unidentified pool.

His argument was that this is structurally unfair: the money is generated disproportionately at grassroots venues, where the performed repertoire belongs largely to smaller and emerging writers, and then redistributed disproportionately to the biggest earners in the society. The pool flows upward, away from the rooms that created it.

As a description of what happens, that's hard to argue with. As a legal claim, it ran into a wall.

The Court of Appeal found for PRS. Lord Justice Miles delivered the reasoning that matters.

An accurate distribution is structurally impossible, because the black box exists precisely because accurate information is absent. If the data existed to match the money to the right writers, that money would never have entered the black box in the first place.

You cannot order a society to pay the correct people when the identity of the correct people is, by definition, unknown. Every alternative allocation method is also a guess — just a different guess. Market share is imperfect, but imperfect is not unlawful when perfect isn't available.

That's the pivot point of the whole case. The court didn't say the outcome was fair. It said the unfairness originates upstream of PRS, in the data — and courts can't legislate data into existence.

This is the part artists should internalize. The system did not fail at payment. It failed at identification, long before anyone tried to pay anyone.

No setlist submitted means the performance can never be matched to a work. An unregistered composition means there is no rights holder on record to pay. Missing ISWC or IPI numbers make the work invisible across society systems that talk to each other in identifiers, not song titles. Undocumented splits mean that even a correctly matched work stalls, because nobody knows who receives what.

Any one of those gaps is enough to send otherwise payable money into the pool.

Registration, metadata, and documented splits are not admin. They are the infrastructure that makes you legible to the machine that distributes money. Without them you are not a low-priority payee — you are not a payee at all.

The distribution of harm here isn't random. The black box is fattest at grassroots venues, and grassroots venues are where independent and emerging writers perform most.

Those same writers are the least likely to have complete registrations, ISWCs assigned, IPI numbers on file, and splits documented in writing before the show. So they generate the pool and then fail to qualify for it, twice over.

Meanwhile every established writer with a clean catalog receives a share of that pool automatically, without doing anything wrong. Nobody in this story is a villain. The mechanism just quietly moves money from the undocumented to the documented.

You can be performed in front of hundreds of people, watch the venue pay its licence fee, and still receive nothing — not because the system failed to collect, but because you were invisible to it at the point of distribution.

Register every composition with your PRO before it is ever performed live, not after. A work that isn't registered on the night of the gig is a work that can't be matched to that gig.

Get your IPI number and make sure every co-writer has theirs on the registration. Confirm ISWCs are assigned and consistent everywhere the work appears.

Document splits in writing before release — a signed split sheet, not a group chat. Unresolved splits freeze money as effectively as no registration at all.

Submit setlists. Every PRO has a live performance reporting route, and most independent artists never use it. It is the single highest-leverage unpaid administrative task in a touring career.

Then audit. Compare what you believe you own against what is actually registered, society by society. The gap between those two lists is your personal contribution to the black box.