A ground-breaking deal with YouTube and a booming live music scene has seen composers and songwriters receive record royalty payouts from their songs being used online, in pubs and on stage.
The Performing Right Society, which collects and pays royalties to composers, songwriters and music publishers, distributed £110m for the first quarter of 2008, up by more than a third on a year earlier.
PRS collects royalties from TV companies, radio stations, shops, bars, hotels and any other commercial venue playing music. Following licensing deals last year with the video-sharing phenomenon YouTube and other social networking websites, PRS now also collects money when songs - either original versions or covers by amateur video uploaders - are played. Live music performances also contribute and, thanks to a buoyant live music scene, those revenues almost doubled from a year ago.
To collect the money and then send out cheques - starting from £1 - to 17,600 members whose works were used, PRS analysed the use of 650,000 songs played a total of 16.5m times during the quarter.
Royalty recipients range from writers of jingles to long-time members whose recent success will bring a bigger cheque than usual - such as the soul singer Duffy who joined in 2003 - to those getting their first cheque, such as new singer Adele.
Steve Porter, chief executive of the MCPS-PRS Alliance of collecting societies, predicts payouts for the year will rise by 6-7% from £370m in 2007.
There remain vast amounts of potential royalties online. "There's still an awful lot to do. For PRS, online and mobile phones, in terms of the total money we collect, represent less than 5%," said Porter.
Finding more revenue sources, however, should not be seen as a crusade against piracy, he suggests. "Our job is to license the use of music wherever we possibly can and there is an exciting opportunity because there are a whole load of usages of music out there that are so far not licensed. I prefer to look at it through that lens rather than say 'there's a whole load of people stealing music'."
The MCPS-PRS Alliance already has deals with all the big mobile phone firms, which means royalties are passed on to writers and composers when their songs are used in ringtones or downloads.
Online, it was the first collecting society outside the US to close a deal with YouTube and has agreements with other networks, including the youth site Bebo. Given that YouTube hosts more than 10m videos potentially containing music, royalty processing is tricky. Some YouTube content is provided by record labels or broadcasters, which "watermark" songs, making them easy to track. Most videos, however, are uploaded by the public.
YouTube, and not the public, pays PRS based on total usage of works by PRS members. The headache for PRS is dividing that money fairly among members. PRS analysts sift through YouTube's most-viewed clips and work out who is owed what based on the music used and number of clicks. PRS has already analysed more than 1.5bn separate views of YouTube videos. For less-viewed videos, where it is impractical to monitor exactly what has been played, statisticians at Cambridge University provide PRS with an "analogy" that estimates what is played and how often, based on what is popular.