£5.7m per year in royalties from music played in UK clubs is being misallocated, report claimsA new report has claimed that only 28 percent of the fees paid out by the average UK nightclub are being distributed correctly to the artists whose music it plays.
The study, conducted by Fair Play, alleges that nearly two-thirds of nightclub performances fail to generate accurate royalty payments to the rightful creators. It claims that for a typical medium nightclub paying £20,000 annually in licence fees, only £5,688 (28.4 percent) reaches the correct creators.
It also alleges that administrative costs consume £4,200 (21 percent), whilst £10,112 (50.6 percent) is misallocated through attribution gaps, which is a 71.6 percent loss before reaching intended recipients.

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To conduct its research, Fair Play engaged with stakeholders across the UK electronic music royalty ecosystem during a six-month period. While a handful of stakeholders contributed valuable insights, it says that “obtaining comprehensive operational data from certain established entities proved challenging”.
The report relies on publicly available information, stakeholder interviews, Fair Play’s operational experience, and reasonable extrapolations from partial data. As a result of its research, Fair Play has outlined key recommendations for stakeholders to improve this disparity.
It suggests that artists and DJs should consider registering with a rights organisation, and that the latter should submit their set lists through available platforms. It also encourages venues and promoters to adopt available music recognition technologies (MRT), and calls on collection societies to increase transparency around attribution methods.
The use of MRT, or the act of DJs simply submitting their set lists to collection platforms, is the most successful way to ensure royalties land in the right pockets. As The Guardian reports, when detailed tracklist information doesn’t exist for a given DJ set, rights organisations will instead extrapolate from the data produced by other venues, send staff to conduct in-person spot checks, or use radio playlists as a proxy.
PRS for Music, the largest performing rights society in the UK, has shared its scepticism of Fair Play’s findings, claiming that its “headline percentage is built on partial inputs”. It does, however, seemingly agree that the core problem lies in the lack of data from venues and DJs about the music they’re playing.
You can download the full report via Fair Play, or  find out more about PRS for Music and how it works.
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