“PRS for Music fully recognises the breadth of opportunity on the horizon with YouTube and other open platforms and is committed to achieving fair remuneration for rightsholders and a level licensing playing field,” CEO Robert Ashcroft said of the arrangement.
This extension is especially notable because PRS for Music has been a vocal critic of safe harbor provisions, the rules that protect services against any copyright infringements that occur through user-generated content. YouTube and SoundCloud are often cited as top beneficiaries of those rules, and Ashcroft has called them out as causing problems for the industry. “There is a huge gap between the value that some digital platforms derive from music and what they pay to creators and this cannot continue,” he said last year. The group even filed a lawsuit against SoundCloud in August over royalty questions. Despite those past critiques, PRS for Music now has licensing agreements with both platforms.