Close enough for jazz
This is apparently a grand scandal now involving lawyers and the rest:
In June, PRS said it paid out a record £1.02bn to rights holders last year, up 8% on 2023, beating its five-year plan to top £1bn by 2026.
Intellectual property has a value it seems. But there’s that problem:
PRS does not reveal how much income is in the so-called black box, which it refers to as the “unclaimed pot”. However, the Guardian has seen a document that showed that for 2019 alone it amounted to £2.7m.
The black box consists of:
In the case of live music, PRS takes a small percentage cut of gross ticket sales from every performance, and after taking a cut for administration redistributes the royalties after successfully matching the setlist performed with the relevant songwriters.
However, at a ballooning number of gigs, classical performances and theatre and variety shows, the collection agency has taken a cut of ticket sales but not been able to allocate it to songwriters because of a lack of information about songs played.
All too many people are not submitting set lists. On the other hand 2.7 million is 0.27% of the 1 billion pot. Which, we’d submit, is close enough for jazz.
Having managed to get that line in there is a more important point here. As Hayek pointed out the centre is never going to gain perfectly exact information about something as large and chaotic as the economy. Therefore - given that lask of perfect information - it’s not possible to plan the economy. Well, not perfectly and accurately it isn’t. As we’ve just seen in fact. The Office for National Statistics’ wealth survey information is now not regarded as a “national statistic”. Too few people are willing to hand in set lists - sorry, reveal their finances to someone standing at the door with a clipboard.
It’s possible the data is out there but that it cannot be collected into the information necessary as an input to a planning process. Or, perhaps, it’s not possible to have a scored part for every player, led by The Great Conducator. Rather, set the basics of tempo, chord structure, start and then play it by ear. As both the past century of music and the past century of economic development have shown.
Tim Worstall