MBW Views is a series of op-eds from eminent music industry people… with something to say. In the following MBW op/ed, Andrea Czapary Martin, CEO of PRS for Music, explains how a website refresh evolved into a fundamental reinvention, and nailed down PRS for Music’s credibility as a digital-first CMO…
For most of our history, we were judged by scale: the size of the repertoire, the size of distributions, the size of international reach.
Those measures matter, but so does how easy we make it for members to manage their rights and royalties; the quality of the member experience.
That is the mindset behind PRS for Music’s shift to an enhanced digital-first model, where our tools and services are built to be flexible, to continuously improve and better adapt to the changing needs of members. Not a refresh; a redesign of how members interact with us and how we work for them.
The landscape demands it. Music is consumed continually across borders and formats, usage has multiplied and AI is reshaping both creative workflows and policy debates.
In that environment, a CMO cannot rely on legacy cycles or periodic relaunches, it has to operate with clarity, pace and resistance. Listening changed the brief.
What started as a tidy-up of our website became a reimagining of how we better provide a more intuitive service. We’re reorganising the site, so common journeys will take one or two steps instead of five or six.
We’re designing mobile-first because that’s where members live. We’re replacing jargon with plain English, and we rebuilt our entire website platform so we can more easily adapt and engage in new ways.
Some systems served us faithfully for 15 or 20 years; they were engineered for a smaller industry and a different internet. A modern collecting society needs the pace and resilience of a modern digital service.
Self-service is central to this, not because we want to push people away. It is about giving music creators greater control over the basics like checking a payment, updating a song split, submitting a setlist whenever it suits them, and reserving human expertise for moments where it is needed, and where it adds real value.
Digital-first also means treating data as the engine of service, not a nice-to-have asset. Data is an opportunity, not a challenge. First, it helps us run the business – standard datasets, monitoring and forecasting so answers are fast and consistent. Second, it becomes a member product, not just PDFs but simple, visual views of what we matched and when, with an easy way to raise a query in context.
Some of this shift is already tangible. In 2024, we paid out more than £1bn to rights-holders for the first time, with over 86,000 members receiving royalties and thousands paid for the first time.
Online royalties are now a major share of distributions, and we moved streaming to monthly payments, aligning our cadence to how music is consumed. Each one of these members come with sets of data usage each year.
Public performance income rebounded strongly as live returned at scale, and anyone who has looked at touring this past year knows why: huge, spectacular shows, held in stadiums and arenas, drove growth.
PRS data in the LIVE Annual Report shows a gig took place every 137 seconds across the UK last year: that’s good news for culture and for the writers who create the songs.
We’re also applying machine learning where it earns its keep: flags for anomalies, signals for potential fraud, and smarter matching in complex datasets. The human stays in the loop; context and judgement are where analysts add most value.
“AI here is a force for optimisation, not replacement. People stay in the loop, it’s just the loop runs faster.”
As one of our data leads puts it, AI here is a force for optimisation, not replacement. People stay in the loop, it is just that the loop runs faster.
AI belongs in this conversation. On the policy side, our view is clear: training and generation must respect creators’ rights, and new uses require licences, not loopholes. A digital-first CMO must deliver both: the tools to make payments faster and the governance that protects the value being paid for.
We also benchmark differently. It is natural to look at other CMOs, and there are areas where we lead and areas where we are investing to move faster. But the more useful benchmark is the best digital products and apps that PRS members already use: banking, travel, etc. Services that handle sensitive information and high-frequency transactions and still feel effortless.
We’ve borrowed proven patterns from that world: clear language; visible status; the ability to start on a phone and finish on a laptop; help that sits next to the task; and a relentless focus on removing friction rather than explaining it.
Over the years, members have already seen us deliver tools essential to streamlining their experience, helping them make music their business. That included better control over their personal data, whether through our new account management tools or via our Nexus works portal.
What will members feel next? Early next year, the new look and feel of our website takes centre stage. When you log in, the things you came for should be in front of you: statements, registrations, setlists, works, and account details. Journeys that used to require a hunt become direct paths.
Moving forward, our goal is to make reporting simpler for everyone involved, including writers, managers, venues and promoters, because accurate setlists are how the right people are paid without delay. We’re designing reporting into the experience so that the ecosystem works for everyone who depends on it.
Context matters. The volume of usage data has exploded over the last decade; matching it accurately, quickly and across borders is the core of member value. The market evolves. Short-form video, fitness platforms, games, VR, new licensing categories and new markets continue to emerge.
The regulatory conversation around AI and creator rights is evolving. Against that backdrop, a collecting society needs to operate like a modern organisation with a public purpose: measured, iterative, open to feedback, designed to learn.
We have reorganised around outcomes and adopted a product discipline that starts with member benefit and works back to the technology. We’ve invested in the foundations so we can ship improvements safely and often.
We build with members, not for them. We treat data as a member product: pre-distribution insight that reduces surprises and post-distribution tools that make sense of what happened; assurance that quietly improves accuracy. And we accept that leadership will be measured by what members experience: less friction, faster clarity, better choices.
There is room for ambition without over-promising. We intend to widen the gap where we already lead – paying faster and maintaining a cost to income ratio below 10%. Where we have more to do, we will say so and prioritise getting there.
If you want one thought to carry into next year, carry this: digital-first only matters if it gives creators back time. It’s why the new journeys are designed to be self-evident, and why human support is there when needed. It’s also why we sometimes choose focus over breadth: a few things done well, then extended, rather than many things announced and quietly deferred.
People will continue to call PRS a collecting society. We collect and distribute, and we will always defend the value of the work. But the difference PRS members will feel increasingly is practical: it will be easier to get things done. The experience is where you will feel it; the data is how we do it; the culture of continuous improvement is what will sustain it.
Music Business Worldwide
