PRS for Music is the body that collects royalties every time a song gets played live or on a soundsystem in the UK, from a pub gig to a Saturday night on a club rig. Every promoter running a house or techno night, every small room booking touring DJs, pays into that same system. So when the organisation representing the UK's smallest venues says PRS's own numbers are wrong, and wrong enough to shut rooms down, it is a story about the plumbing the entire underground scene runs on, not just the indie circuit.
Music Venue Trust (MVT), the UK charity that represents grassroots venues, launched a campaign called 'Set The Record Straight: Fair Licensing Fees' on 14 April, led by its rights management specialist Gareth Kelly. MVT says it has traced more than £666,000 in disputed or incorrect PRS charges across England, Scotland and Wales, broken down region by region: over £56,000 in the North West, more than £75,000 in Scotland, over £80,000 in Wales, close to £50,000 in London and over £20,000 in the South West. The worst single case, MVT says, was a £90,000 error at one venue alone, a sum it points out is enough to permanently close a grassroots room.
How does a collecting society get a venue's bill wrong by £90,000?
MVT's case is not that venues shouldn't pay PRS. "The issue is whether those fees are being calculated accurately, applied fairly and charged to the right party," Gareth Kelly said. MVT points to three recurring faults: PRS billing on estimated rather than actual usage data, using a venue's theoretical maximum capacity instead of real attendance to set the fee, and blurred lines over who is liable when an outside promoter, not the venue, books and runs the night. That last point matters directly for club culture, where a venue frequently hosts a promoter's house or techno night under a completely separate booking arrangement, and MVT says venues have been billed for events they didn't control.
The consequence isn't a strongly worded letter. Five grassroots venues have already had County Court Judgments entered against them over disputed or estimated PRS assessments, and MVT says more than 50 further venues are facing legal threats. A CCJ damages a small operator's credit rating and can trigger further enforcement action, on top of a bill the venue disputes was ever calculated correctly in the first place. PRS, per Music Week, has acknowledged it relies on estimates when a venue doesn't supply its own data, and says it is investing in better data collection, including AI tools to help recover setlist information.
"This campaign is about bringing transparency into that space and making sure the system works fairly," MVT founder and CEO Mark Davyd said.
Is anything actually changing?
Something is moving. In June, MVT announced it is working with Audoo, an audio-recognition tech company, to fit real-time listening meters called Audio Meters into 120 grassroots venues. The idea is to replace PRS's estimates and proxy data (radio airplay patterns, streaming trends, manual surveys) with what venues actually played, night after night, and use that to check whether royalty distributions match reality. MVT has been careful to frame this as a fix, not an attack on the principle of the licence: songwriters and composers should get paid when their work is performed. The argument is narrower and sharper than that: the collecting society's own maths, MVT says, is currently wrong often enough, and by enough money, to close the venues that book the acts PRS exists to pay.
