Royalties get lost on the dance floor

The Association For Electronic Music has launched a campaign to highlight their view that £100 million in performance royalties are not paid to the righful creators of the music - because of incomplete or missing data. The Get Played Get Paid campaign was unveiled yesterday at the Amsterdam Dance Event. In the UK alone, AFEM estimates that PRS and PPL collect £15 million per year in royalties for public plays of dance music in clubs, on radio and elsewhere, but often this is not finding its way to the recording artists and songwriters who made it. AFEM CEO Mark Lawrence explained: "The problem is that the money collected does not necessarily go to the right people. Part of the problem is down to writers, artists and tracks not being registered at collection societies so the organisations don't know who to pay, but even more significantly, most societies do not have accurate granular data on what is actually played in clubs. AFEM is working with the electronic music community and the collection society network in an attempt to tackle these problems head-on". PRS For Music had previously recognised that many dance music creators were not registered with the collecting society system and launched the Amplify campaign to encourage them to sign up.