Venue play data will tilt towards big catalogues. Do it anyway

Counting every song played in a shop sounds like an obvious win for songwriters. In the short run, it may mostly be a win for the songwriters who were already winning. We think societies should do it anyway, and go further.

The news hook

PRS for Music will use play-by-play data from Soundtrack, a background-music service for businesses, covering about 7,000 UK premises, in royalty payments from December 2026, Music Business Worldwide reports. We covered the deal in our news post. Until now PRS has paid much of this money using performance details from a sample of venues, used "alongside broadcast data" for what it calls analogy payments, plus data from pre-set music system providers (PRS for Music). MBW puts PRS's 2025 public-performance revenue at £313.4 million.

The best case against counting

The strongest objection is not about privacy; the data is about tracks, not people. It is about who the data sees.

The venues in the Soundtrack feed are businesses that pay for a curated streaming service, and MBW names its clients as brands like Uniqlo, Dr. Martens and Four Seasons. Chain-store playlists lean on familiar catalogue. Swap an estimate for a count from those rooms and money moves, with more precision, towards the major-label and big-publisher repertoire those playlists favour. The independent pub with a CD changer, or the café playing a local writer's record, is still outside the count and still paid by proxy. Worse, once tracked data covers part of the pool, the untracked part is easier to treat as an afterthought.

Then there is cost. TheMusicLicence fee is set by sector tariffs and by factors such as floor area, staff numbers or capacity (PPL PRS). If accurate data becomes the expectation, the pressure falls on small venues to install systems that report, which is a cost the chains have already absorbed. On this view, census data from one supplier is not fairer; it is a more confident version of the same bias.

That argument is fair, and on day one it is probably right about where the money goes.

Our answer

A count can be checked; a sample can't. When a sample under-pays a song, nobody can show it, because the plays were never recorded. When a count under-pays one, the gap is visible and someone can dispute it. Bias you can measure is bias you can fix. This is our inference, not something PRS has said.

The fix is more feeds, not fewer. The objection is really that 7,000 premises is too narrow. PRS already takes data from background-music providers and told MBW this deal expands that work. Every extra supplier, including cheaper ones aimed at small venues, shrinks the part of the pool still paid by guesswork. The answer to a skewed census is a wider census.

Small venues shouldn't pay for it. The cost worry is real but it points at who should carry the data, not whether to collect it. Reporting should come from the music services venues already use, not from new kit on the bar. If societies want counted plays from independents, they should make it free for the venue to provide them.

Songwriters can act now. Counted plays pay only works that match a registration. If your music is on business playlists, register every work and check your credits match your releases. Then the count can find you.