PRS for Music will pay on what Soundtrack actually plays in 7,000 UK venues

PRS for Music, the UK society that collects for songwriters, composers and publishers, has partnered with Soundtrack, a background-music streaming service for businesses. Music Business Worldwide reports that Soundtrack will give PRS play-by-play data on the tracks played in the roughly 7,000 UK premises that use its platform, including ownership details. PRS will use it in royalty payments from December 2026.

What changes

Until now, much of the money PRS collects from background music has been paid out by estimate. PRS's own public spaces page says it collects performance details from a sample of UK venues and uses them "alongside broadcast data to inform our representative public performance analogy payments". It also collects data from pre-set music system providers to make that sample more representative. According to MBW, PRS says the Soundtrack deal reduces its reliance on comparable data used where direct information is missing, and extends the number of businesses where it has direct usage data. PRS told MBW it has worked with background-music providers this way for years; this expands that work.

The money is not small. MBW reports that PRS's public-performance revenue, which covers shops, restaurants and bars as well as live music, reached £313.4 million in 2025, up 9.1% on the year. New PRS chief executive Ben McOwen Wilson, in the job since 12 October, told MBW the aim is to pay members "as accurately and as quickly as we can". Soundtrack founder Ola Sars said most countries still distribute these royalties on proxy data.

Soundtrack began in 2013 as Spotify Business, a joint venture with Spotify, and bought the UK's Ambie and Belgium's Tunify in February 2026, MBW reports. Its clients include Uniqlo, Dr. Martens and Four Seasons.

What we think

A sample pays the songs that look like the sample. When royalties are set by a few venues plus broadcast data, money drifts towards what radio plays, because that is what the model can see. An indie songwriter whose track sits on a café playlist for months but never gets airplay is the person a sample is most likely to miss. A count of every play in 7,000 venues is far better evidence that those plays exist.

Two cautions. First, 7,000 premises is a slice of UK businesses, and it's the slice that buys a curated streaming service, so the data will skew to chains and brands that use Soundtrack's playlists. Census data from one supplier is still a biased sample of the whole market, just a better one. Second, play-by-play data only pays you if your metadata is clean. The ownership details Soundtrack passes on have to match a registered work at PRS. If you write songs, register every work with your society and make sure your distributor's ISRC and songwriter credits line up. Better data rewards the people whose paperwork is already in order.

The bigger point is the one Sars made: most of the world still pays this money on proxies. If the UK can show that venue data is cheap enough to use, other societies have less excuse not to.