Cutting the cost of background music
It might surprise you to know that we have to pay rather a lot of money to The Performing Rights Society (PRS) and also to PPL in order to be able to play background music at The Willow Tree. In fact, the latest licence fees total over £600 per year, the majority of which goes to PRS.
Both PPL & PRS base their fees on the size of the premises and in the case of PRS the number of rooms in which copyrighted music is played. Neither organisation take any account of the number of hours that the business is open. Since we only usually open for 4 hours in the evening, we pay a lot more "per song" than a business which is open all day. We've argued that we should pay a reduced fee because we play less music - but PRS and PPL are not open to negotiating on that issue.
No one comes into The Willow Tree to listen to the music, it's only there to break the silence and to make a little bit of atmosphere. It is certainly not worth £600/year for this! To put it in context, if we sell around 200 pints of beer each week in the pub, you could consider about 6p from the profit in each pint paying for the background music!
So we have decided to cancel our PRS and PPL licences and instead we have found a source of royalty-free music at a much reduced cost. While the royalty-free music may be by unknown artists, it is perfectly adequate for our purposes and since we've been playing it at The Willow Tree, no one has spotted the difference.
We have signed-up with Jamendo and they provide us with thousands of royalty-free songs and music across a wide range of genres for, in our case, a fee of 48 Euros per year. (The fee is higher for larger premises or multiple outlets etc.) Music can be streamed from their website, or you can download the songs as we have done and play them by whatever means is suitable. We stream them from a PC to a wireless media player in the bar.
A solution such as Jamendo won't be appropriate for many pubs where they have a juke box, live bands, DJs etc ... but for smaller country pubs and restaurants it can save you a lot of unnecessary expense.
Both PPL & PRS base their fees on the size of the premises and in the case of PRS the number of rooms in which copyrighted music is played. Neither organisation take any account of the number of hours that the business is open. Since we only usually open for 4 hours in the evening, we pay a lot more "per song" than a business which is open all day. We've argued that we should pay a reduced fee because we play less music - but PRS and PPL are not open to negotiating on that issue.
No one comes into The Willow Tree to listen to the music, it's only there to break the silence and to make a little bit of atmosphere. It is certainly not worth £600/year for this! To put it in context, if we sell around 200 pints of beer each week in the pub, you could consider about 6p from the profit in each pint paying for the background music!
So we have decided to cancel our PRS and PPL licences and instead we have found a source of royalty-free music at a much reduced cost. While the royalty-free music may be by unknown artists, it is perfectly adequate for our purposes and since we've been playing it at The Willow Tree, no one has spotted the difference.
We have signed-up with Jamendo and they provide us with thousands of royalty-free songs and music across a wide range of genres for, in our case, a fee of 48 Euros per year. (The fee is higher for larger premises or multiple outlets etc.) Music can be streamed from their website, or you can download the songs as we have done and play them by whatever means is suitable. We stream them from a PC to a wireless media player in the bar.
A solution such as Jamendo won't be appropriate for many pubs where they have a juke box, live bands, DJs etc ... but for smaller country pubs and restaurants it can save you a lot of unnecessary expense.
posted by Brett at
13:33
0 Comments
