You have booked the acts, signed the venue contract and set your on-sale date. Then someone asks whether you have sorted your PRS licence, and you realise you are not entirely sure what that is, whether it applies to you, or what it costs. You are not alone: music licensing is one of the most consistently misunderstood line items in a UK event budget, and it is also one of the easiest to get right once you know which tariff applies to you.
This guide explains, promoter to promoter, what PRS for Music actually licenses, how Tariff LP works for live popular music concerts, what the 4% covers, when the £18 minimum applies (and when it can be waived), and how PRS differs from PPL. It is written for people putting on gigs, club nights and festivals — not for lawyers.
What PRS for Music actually licenses
When music is performed in public — live on stage, or played from a recording — the people who wrote it are owed royalties. PRS for Music is the UK collecting society that licenses the musical work: the composition itself, on behalf of songwriters, composers and publishers.
That right exists regardless of who is on stage. It does not matter that the artist is performing their own songs, or that you have paid the artist a fee: the performance royalty for the underlying work is collected separately through the licence, and the licence is a cost of putting on the show.
There is a second, distinct organisation you will hear about in the same breath: PPL, which licenses the sound recording and pays performers and record labels. We will come back to the difference below, because conflating the two is the single most common confusion in this area.
Tariff LP: the licence for live popular music concerts
If you promote a live popular music concert with paid admission, the tariff that applies to you is Tariff LP (Live Popular). The headline numbers, from PRS for Music's own Tariff LP FAQs and the official Tariff LP document published on GOV.UK, are:
- 4% of gross box office receipts — the standard rate.
- 4.2% if you do not declare other charges, such as booking fees, alongside your ticket revenue.
- A minimum fee of £18 per event — reduced from £39 in 2018 — which can be waived if you comply with the reporting requirements.
This is not an arbitrary rate set unilaterally. Tariff LP was ratified by the Copyright Tribunal in 2018, after PRS for Music negotiated it with industry bodies representing the live sector, including the Music Venue Trust (MVT), the Concert Promoters Association (CPA) and the National Arenas Association (NAA). In other words: the trade bodies that represent promoters and venues were in the room, and the tariff that came out of that process is the one you pay.
What "4% of gross box office" means for your budget
The mechanics are straightforward: the licence fee scales with your ticket revenue. If your gig grosses £5,000 in box office receipts, the Tariff LP fee at the standard rate is £200. If your festival grosses £250,000, it is £10,000. Because it is a percentage rather than a flat fee, it behaves like your other revenue-linked costs — ticketing fees, card processing, venue percentage deals — and should be modelled the same way, as a percentage line in your event P&L from day one.
The difference between 4% and 4.2% is worth taking seriously. On that £250,000 festival, failing to declare your other charges properly costs an extra £500 — money you lose purely through incomplete paperwork. Declare everything, and you stay on the standard rate.
The £18 minimum — and how small promoters can avoid it
For small events, the percentage can work out below the £18 minimum, in which case the minimum applies. Two things matter here:
- 1The minimum used to be £39 and was reduced to £18 in 2018, as part of the same Copyright Tribunal process.
- 2The minimum is waivable if you meet the reporting requirements — which, in practice, means reporting your ticketing data completely and accurately.
If you are running a 100-cap show where every pound counts, this is the concrete takeaway: the reporting is not just an administrative chore, it is the mechanism that can make the minimum fee disappear.
Reporting: the obligation promoters underestimate
Under Tariff LP, the promoter must report all ticket types completely and accurately. Not just general admission — every category: early birds, tiers, VIP, guest-list conversions, comps that carry a charge. The rate you pay (4% vs 4.2%) and your eligibility to have the minimum waived both hinge on the quality of this reporting.
This is exactly where promoters with fragmented ticketing get into trouble. If your sales are spread across two marketplaces, a door spreadsheet and a stack of paper tickets sold at the record shop, assembling a complete and accurate declaration of gross box office receipts is genuinely hard — and the temptation is to approximate, which is how you end up on the wrong rate.
It is also worth knowing that how you present charges to buyers is regulated separately: UK consumer law requires the price shown to include all unavoidable charges from the outset, as set out in the Trading Standards guidance on ticket sales. Clean, transparent pricing serves both obligations at once: what the buyer sees is honest, and what you report to PRS reconciles with what you actually charged.
PRS vs PPL: two rights, one combined licence for venues
Here is the distinction, in one line each:
- PRS for Music licenses the *work* — it pays songwriters, composers and publishers.
- PPL licenses the *recording* — it pays performers and record labels.
A live band performing on stage engages the PRS side. Recorded music — including DJ sets, warm-up playlists and interval music — engages PPL as well, because you are playing recordings. For venues, both are licensed together through a joint venture, PPL PRS Ltd, under a single product called TheMusicLicence.
The practical question for a promoter is: what does the venue's existing licence cover, and what falls to me? Tariff LP is aimed squarely at the promoter of live popular music concerts with paid admission — it is calculated on *your* box office. Do not assume the venue's day-to-day music licence covers your ticketed show; put the question to the venue in writing during the booking conversation, alongside capacity and curfew. If you run club nights, where recorded music is the show, the PPL side of the equation matters just as much as PRS.
Not popular music? Tariff LC for classical concerts
Tariff LP covers *popular* music. Classical music concerts have their own tariff, Tariff LC, with its own terms — the official document is published by PPL PRS here. If your programming spans both worlds, do not assume one tariff stretches across everything you promote: check which applies per event.
Do not confuse music licensing with other event licences
"Do I need a licence for my event?" is really several questions wearing one coat. Promoters routinely mix up:
- the venue's premises licence (a local authority matter),
- street trading rules, and
- whether selling tickets online itself needs a licence.
Music licensing through PRS and PPL is separate from all of these — holding one does not cover another. Community-sector guidance such as the Resource Centre's overview of licensing and regulations is a useful starting point for the non-music side. Treat each obligation as its own checklist item.
One adjacent point while you are budgeting: ticket revenue also interacts with VAT. Admission charges to events in the UK are generally standard-rated at 20% where the organiser is VAT-registered, with a cultural exemption available to certain eligible bodies — the primary source is HMRC's VAT Notice 701/47. Model your PRS percentage and your VAT position together, or your "gross box office" and your actual margin will drift apart in ways that surprise you after the event.
How Futura Tickets helps with the paperwork side
Nothing exempts you from music licensing — but your ticketing infrastructure decides how painful the reporting is. Futura Tickets gives promoters:
- A single source of truth for box office data. Every ticket type, tier and price point in one organiser dashboard, so "report all ticket types completely and accurately" is an export, not an archaeology project.
- Box office and door control in one system. On-site sales and access control with encrypted QR codes feed the same numbers as online sales, so your declared gross matches reality.
- Official, controlled resale. When resale happens inside your own system instead of on the street, your revenue records stay complete.
- Flexible settlement and cashless. Clear, reconciled money flows across tickets, bars and top-ups make it easier to separate ticket revenue from other charges — precisely the distinction the 4% vs 4.2% rate turns on.
We will not tell you a platform makes you "compliant" — no ticketing platform can claim that, and you should be sceptical of any that does. What good tooling gives you is complete, accurate, exportable data, which is what the tariff actually asks of you.
The bottom line
If you promote live popular music with paid admission in the UK, budget 4% of gross box office for your PRS for Music licence under Tariff LP, declare your other charges so you stay off the 4.2% rate, report every ticket type properly, and remember that the £18 minimum can be waived if your reporting is in order. Know the difference between PRS (the work) and PPL (the recording), confirm in writing what your venue already holds, and never assume one licence covers another.
*This article is general information for event promoters, not legal or tax advice. Tariffs, rates and licensing requirements change — always check the current terms with PRS for Music, PPL PRS Ltd and a qualified adviser before budgeting your event.*
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