PRS for Music Will Use Shop and Bar Playlists to Pay Songwriters From December
From December 2026, PRS for Music will start paying songwriters, composers and music publishers using data on which tracks are played in shops, bars and other public spaces. The UK collecting society announced the partnership with Soundtrack, a music streaming service built for businesses, on 28 October.
PRS for Music collects licence fees when music is played in public and passes the money to the people who wrote and published it. The new arrangement gives the society data showing which tracks are played across around 7,000 premises that use Soundtrack's platform. The aim, as Music Business Worldwide reported, is to pay royalties more precisely, based on what is actually played.
Soundtrack's customers include Ole & Steen, Uniqlo, Dr. Martens, Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, Kiehl's, Joe & The Juice and TAG Heuer. The UK Parliament also uses the service. So a song drifting through a coffee chain or a hotel lobby could now be logged, and counted, in a way that was not possible before.
The society is large. PRS for Music represents more than 190,000 songwriters, composers and music publishers. In 2025 it collected £1.24 billion and paid out £1.07 billion in royalties. Its public performance revenues, the money from music played in public places, reached £313.4 million in 2025, up 9.1% on the year before.
Leadership has also changed hands recently. Ben McOwen Wilson joined PRS for Music as chief executive on 12 October. He had been managing director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa at Google Play.
For the people who write the songs, the practical question is simple. Will a track that spent a week on shop speakers earn more than it did before? The answer depends on the payment rules that take effect in December, and the first payments under the new system will show how the data is used in practice.
