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Competition authority to review previous undertakings made by PRS

By | Published on Friday 27 November 2015

PRS For Music

The Competition And Markets Authority is launching a review of the UK music publishing sector’s collecting society PRS as part of a “systematic review of existing merger, market and monopoly remedies”.

Collective licensing, where pretty much all rights owners license certain groups of licensees as one through a collecting society, is very common in music of course (and occurs in some other creative sectors too), though still raises some competition law concerns. Which is why collective licensing deals are subject to extra regulation.

It also means that competition authorities in different countries often take an interest in the operations of local collecting societies. In the mid-1990s, the UK’s Monopolies And Mergers Commission, a forerunner of the CMA, investigated the operations of PRS.

The society then gave a number of undertakings to the MMC in 1997, including, the CMA recalls, “allowing its members to administer their own live performing rights” and various commitments “over its corporate governance and the provision of information to the Office Of Fair Trading”.

In July, the CMA began a consultation on whether or not it should review thirteen sets of “market and monopoly remedies” that were put in place by the authority’s predecessors prior to 2005. And on the back of that, it has decided PRS’s undertakings are something worth looking into.

It’s worth revisiting those undertakings, says the CMA, because of “internal changes made by the PRS; legislative changes including the forthcoming implementation of a new EU Directive covering collective rights management; and wider changes in the music industry including the growth of online and digital music including downloads and streaming”.

However, the CMA stresses, the review will only look at the impact those changes have had on the specific undertakings agreed in 1997, which may need altering or axing as a result of said changes. It will not be an all-encompassing review of the collective licensing of musical works in 2015.

Having recently confirmed this review is now on its agenda, the CMA says it will publish more details and a timeline next month.



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