PRS offering £10 Membership!

The PRS For Music organisation (previously known as The Performing Rights Society) are now offering songwriters and composers membership for only £10, which doesn’t need to be paid in advance of membership, but can simply be deducted from the artist’s first royalty payment.

The PRS was founded in 1914 as the collecting society for UK songwriters, composers and music publishers. An alliance between the PRS and The Mechanical Copyright Protection Society (MCPS-PRS Alliance), formed in 1997, has adopted the PRS for Music brand this year.

Basically, when a piece of music is written, the writer of that music needs to give permission for that music to be publicly performed. The role of the PRS is to act as an agent for its members in order to collect performing royalties whenever their musical works are performed in public, broadcast or transmitted. International laws protect the author of a piece of music, who retains complete rights to the intellectual property they have created.

The criteria is simply that you must have at least one piece of music that has been: • Broadcast on radio/TV • Used online • Performed live in concert • Otherwise played in public You only need to meet one of the above criteria and evidence must be provided to support this.

£10 is approximately the price of a sniff of petrol or a single rail fare that will get you about 2 miles these days, so if you’re writing tunes that are already on Myspace and meeting the above criteria then what is there to lose? Otherwise, it will all go to Bono and nobody wants that. Agreed?

Go here to find out more about how to join the PRS