Our company has now received several rather nasty-looking letters from the PRS, the organisation that takes it upon itself to collect royalties for the performance of music in the UK.
The gist of it is that they want us to pay nearly £100 per year to be able to listen to radios while at work- the rub is that not only do the radio stations ALREADY pay the PRS based on their listener numbers (of which we would undoubtedly be part), but no royalties would be due if we all listened in, even to the same radio station, on individual radios using headphones!
It's not as though radio is a subscription service (eg. SKY TV) where we would be evading fees by all using the same radio, the PRS or anybody else would receive no more money by our having individual sets- so what's the problem? Methinks a greedy organisation is trying to get two or more bites of the same cherry.
I won't say whether we have radios here or not, but in my opinion these rentier-minded organisations are simply hurting themselves in the long run. The vast majority of bosses will just ban radios from the premises, rather than pay the licensing fees or risk being caught. If fewer people hear radio programming at work (commercial or BBC) then fewer people will hear new music, and music sales will suffer in the long run.
Obviously the PRS prefer a penny today rather than a pound tomorrow.
Here's another idea- if every workplace in Britain became music-free, what would be the effect on productivity? Would the economy suffer? I would be willing to bet it would- leaving workers less likely than ever to spend their hard-earned on £15 CDs.
