Tuesday, June 14, 2022

No support act

It's not so much a case of biting the hand that feeds as just cutting it clean off. PRS for Music, who supposedly look after musicians' interests, have decided to cut the funding to the PRS Foundation by 60 per cent - an incredibly myopic move that will have a hugely detrimental impact on the next generation of artists and therefore on PRS for Music's future revenue streams.

What's more, as Annabella Coldrick of the Music Managers Forum argues, the timing couldn't be worse: "Artists have just gone through two years in which they've had no live earnings. The cost of touring's gone up, tickets aren't selling because of the cost of living crisis. And yet their collecting society, which is sitting on enormous revenues, is slashing their funding."

The likely result is an industry that becomes even less accessible to those without financial resources - and consequently less diverse and less interesting.

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