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PRS rebrands – sidelines MCPS initials
By CMU Editorial | Published on Monday 19 January 2009
I’m never sure on the need for name changes. I mean, did Norwich Union really have to shell out £10 million on a superstar ad campaign to tell us to stop calling them by their long-established generally-quite-respected certainly-quite-sensible traditional name – ie the Norwich Union – and instead use the stupid name adopted by their FTSE parent company, Aviva.
I mean, in these difficult economic times and all that, isn’t that just a bit irresponsible? I know the credit crunch is hitting us all, but I’m not sure Ringo Starr and Bruce Willis needed any financial assistance.
Anyway, I digress. And I suppose if anyone did need a new identity, it was an organisation whose abbreviated name was The MCPS-PRS Alliance – such a complicated name that most people have generally chosen to pick one bit of it when referring to the UK’s publishing rights collecting society, though different people chose different bits, so sometimes MCPS, sometimes PRS, or sometimes The Alliance. I’ve always like the more simple The.
Anyway, the boss of The Alliance, Steve Porter, announced at music business convention MIDEM in Cannes yesterday that from this moment onwards his organisation shall be known as PRS For Music.
The aim, it seems, is to have a more consumer friendly name, to boost public recognition for what they do, and also to encourage the increasing number of bedroom songwriters who may be getting an audience for their music directly via digital services like YouTube or MySpace to sign up and claim any royalties they are due.
In another bid to sign up those bedroom songwriters, the collecting society also announced it was reducing its new writer joining membership fee from £100 to £10, which seems like a good thing to me.
Speaking on the importance of these songwriters to the collecting society, Porter told Billboard: “They may not have heard of PRS or PRS for Music. That can’t be a good thing. Twenty years from now, this will be the catalogue. We needed to ask: what do the these people want and are the services we are providing relevant?”
In an official statement on the name change, the society says this: “The industry is changing Technology is transforming the music industry, new channels and formats are emerging and boundaries are blurring. Licensees deserve efficient solutions while music creators have a right to be paid. So we’re changing too. Now we have a new identity, we have the opportunity to reintroduce ourselves to our members and customers and reiterate who we are and what we do. We think the new identity represents us more effectively. It’s bold, clear and effective. Ultimately, it will help us to raise more revenue and distribute more royalties to our members”.
Although the MCPS initials will disappear from the body’s name, the mechanical rights division of the Society will still be known by that moniker and will, I think, continue to be technically speaking a separate entity (PRS and MCPS having kept a certain autonomy from each other despite their merger a decade ago).
That said, MCPS will only deal with licensing songs for physical releases by record companies on CDs and the like. Licensing for digital services, both downloading and streaming, something which has sat between PRS and MCPS up until now, will not now be part of the MCPS division at all, and will be handled exclusively by the PRS part of PRS For Music.
Given that part of the rebrand is designed to encourage bedroom songwriters who self-distribute their songs via MySpace and YouTube, PRS For Music probably need to reach some kind of licensing deal with the former. While YouTube is licensed by PRS, the Rupert Murdoch-owned social networking website is not. On that point, Porter told Billboard: “We are in extensive negotiations with MySpace”.
