Live music royalties fell a further 30 per cent in 2021, with the return of concerts last summer not enough to improve on 2020’s figures.
PRS for Music – the organisation tasked with collecting royalties for songwriters – reported just £8 million in concert revenues last year. This was down from £11.3m in 2020, and from £54m in 2019.
Pre-pandemic, 124,000 live music sets were reported, compared to just 19,300 last year.
There is belief that the industry will bounce back in 2022, with 240 major tours scheduled in the UK this year, though the total revenue is not expected to return to 2019 levels until 2023 at the earliest.
Overall, 2021 was still a solid year for the PRS. The body raked in royalties of £777.1m, re-approaching the pre-pandemic figure of £810m.
PRS CEO, Andrea Martin, said: “I’m very excited and proud of these results because they show that the music industry is very resilient. It really shows that music connects and engages people and that we can bounce back.”
Despite the challenges, the PRS processed a staggering 27 trillion music “performances” (“plays” seems a more fitting word) in 2021. This includes streams, downloads, radio and TV broadcasts, as well as music played in pubs, clubs, hairdressers and concert venues.
Meanwhile, streaming royalties rose again. Services such as Spotify and Apple Music generated £225.5m in royalties in 2021, up 45 per cent from 2019.
