Finding your way through the licensing maze

English Dance and Song Spring 2022

This article appears in English Dance and Song, the magazine of the English Folk Dance and Song Society. The world’s oldest magazine for folk music and dance, EDS was first published in 1936 and is essential reading for anyone with a passion for folk arts. 

When faced with an array of acronyms such as PPL, PRS and MCPS, plus layers of confusing rules, dance club organisers may be tempted to ignore the rules about playing recorded music at their events.

Here, John Sweeney – dancer, caller, teacher, choreographer, historian and organiser of contrafusion.co.uk – guides us through the terms and red tape.

Hopefully you agree that all the people who write, play and record the wonderful music that we dance to should be paid for their music. The law certainly believes it: you’re infringing copyright if you play live or recorded music in public without a licence. You could be sued for damages.

Phonographic Performance Limited (PPL) is all about playing recorded music and making sure that the people who contributed to those recordings – the record companies and performers – get paid. Meanwhile, the Performing Right Society – now known as PRS for Music – is all about live performances and represents songwriters, composers and music publishers whenever their music is played or performed publicly. 

Using recorded music

If you run a dance using recorded music, you need to ensure that either you, the organiser or the venue hold appropriate PPL licences. If you run the venue and/ or also sometimes use live music, then you will need a PRS for Music licence as well.

Fortunately, PPL and PRS have joined forces to simplify the icensing and offer the appropriate licences in one place. You now just need TheMusicLicence, which you can obtain from
pplprs.co.uk. Where you run a dance using recorded music and are not responsible for the venue, you will only need the PPL element of TheMusicLicence. Click on ‘View the Tariffs’, then ‘PPL Tariffs’. There are two relevant tariffs:

• Folk dance club tariff: PPLPP026
  A folk dance club or ceilidh club can, as an entity, take out a PPLPP026 licence, which will apply to all their callers. The latest guidance from PPL is that a caller who calls at folk dance clubs, folk festivals, barn dances and ceilidhs, primarily using folk music, can also use this licence for all these activities.
• Practice and social dances tariff: PPLPP023
  A caller who calls at barn dances and other types of dance, using a wider range of music, may need a PPLPP023 licence instead of the PPLPP026.

In either case, you need to multiply the number of events per year by the average number of participants. If that result is under 2,000, then you currently (March 2022) just pay £82.31 per year.

Using and building set lists

To ensure that the right people get paid, you need to let PPL know your set list – that is, which tracks you have played. Contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and request their Music Usage Reporting Template. You can report at any interval you choose, eg, monthly, quarterly or yearly.

As you build a database of the tracks that you use and record, their key identifier (the ISRC) against them, it will get easier and easier to make a report.

While some folk dance clubs do submit set lists regularly, the majority currently don’t provide any data to PPL. Fortunately, PPL splits the money into funds by genre and licence type, so your favourite folk artists should get your licence money, rather than it going to artists like Ed Sheeran or Dua Lipa. If there is not enough data, then PPL will also use data from folk programmes on the radio, which is likely to favour big names rather than folk dance bands. So, the more of us that report our set lists, the better the outcome is for the artists.

People often ask if it is okay to play recordings of traditional music or music by friendly bands who don’t mind. If the band has signed up with PPL or PRS for Music, they can’t make separate agreements with you and you still need a licence, so that the performers of the traditional music get paid.

Copying music

The Mechanical Copyright Protection Society (MCPS) protects the copyright of owners whenever their music is copied. If you search the internet, you will find that the law was changed in 2014 so you could legally make private copies of music tracks – but that law was quashed in 2015.

So, if you copy a track to an MP3 player, laptop or USB drive for convenience, you are breaking the law. There are some exceptions; some music services have done their own deals with record companies to allow you to download to multiple devices. But you are not allowed to make additional copies of those tracks. Furthermore, you still need to ensure that you are licensed to use those recordings in public.

If you wish to make copies of the tracks you are using, you need to get a ProDub Licence – currently £85.11 for the first 1,000 tracks. If you have made copies in the past, you can include them, retrospectively, in your first year’s licence. Once you have a legal library of music, you can keep using the tracks without having to pay further fees – until you start copying again.

Conclusion

It is very easy for all of us to make our use of recorded music legal, and the licence fees seem fairly reasonable. Sadly, the money is unlikely to go to the bands that are played, unless we all make some changes to the way we work:

• The bands and the tracks need to be registered with PPL – it’s free to do. I just checked my latest set list – only 23 of the 110 tracks were recorded correctly in the PPL database (search for ‘PPL repertoire search’). There are a lot of folk dance tracks in the database but we need lots more, and they need to be registered correctly.
• We need more clubs and callers to start reporting their set lists regularly.
• There would need to be enough commonality of the music played to achieve significant reports for a particular band. 

Let’s all work on registering and reporting as much as we can.

David Tonks, Licensing Business Development Manager at PPL PRS, describes the processes for club dance organisers in more detail.

Under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, permission is needed from the copyright holders – generally those who create, record and publish music – in order to play or perform music in public (broadly, this means in any other context than a domestic one).

PPL PRS Ltd provides this permission, on behalf of PPL and PRS for Music, in relation to the vast majority of commercially released music in the UK and licenses that music for use by businesses and organisations in the UK via TheMusicLicence. Previously, businesses and organisations had to obtain separate music licences from PPL and PRS for Music but PPL PRS Ltd was formed to enable businesses and organisations to acquire the necessary licence in one place. After business costs, music licence fees are distributed to writers, performers, publishers and record companies.

As part of a prior arrangement with PPL the English Folk Song and Dance Society offered the PPL element of TheMusicLicence to its members on behalf of PPL PRS. That arrangement did not include the PRS for Music element which was often covered directly by a venue as opposed to the folk club. However, we are no longer able to provide this service, therefore if you use recorded music during folk dancing sessions you will need to purchase the PPL element of TheMusicLicence directly from PPL PRS.

PPL PRS Ltd issues licences for folk club dances under PPL’s Folk Club Dances Tariff, with the cost determined by how many people attend your dances over the course of a year. You will need to provide PPL PRS with:

(1) the number of classes you teach each week,
(2) the number of weeks per year in which you teach and
(3) the average number of people who attend each session.

If you provide sessions at more than one venue during the year, you need to provide the details for the sessions you provide combined i.e. the total number of classes and attendance at all of the venues etc.

The fees payable currently (February 2022) start at £76.85 for an annual attendance of up to 2,000 people and increase annually in line with inflation on 1 March.

As noted above, in most situations you, as a club, will only require the PPL element of TheMusicLicence when you use recorded music, however if you operate the venue from which you hold your dances you may also need to obtain the PRS for Music element of the TheMusicLicence.

For more information, please visit www.pplprs.co.uk or call PPL PRS’ new business team on 0333 258 5690.

If you are a dance organiser and find that the PPL database does not yet include some of the bands, recordings and tracks that you play, please let us know. We have created a simple form.

Where possible, we’ll contact the artists and encourage them to register with PPL for next time. 

With our combined commitment, we should in future find more of our set lists on the PPL database.

 Photo by Dan Asaki on Unsplash.