Blog: PRS Statement Day

< previous

Yesterday was PRS Statement Day, that most wonderful of festive occasions that comes around for Performing Rights Society members anywhere from zero to four times a year, depending upon whether you have accrued enough songwriting royalties for them to look down kindly upon you and hand over some CA$H.

Happily for me, after about a year of NOT being visited by Santa PRS, I finally made enough for it to mean that I DID get paid this time, and received the princely sum of £30.71! It is, of course, not the money that counts - as I always say, if I was ever in this for the money then I would very quickly have done something else instead - but rather the big list you get that shows where your many micro-pennies have accrued.

And OH! what a delight the list was this time, as it was full of WEIRD and FUN stuff, notably the fact that Thank Goodness For Christmas is gradually making its way to being one of my top ten earning songs of all time! Obviously, that is a pretty low bar to clamber over, but still. It's done well over several statements now because it apparently made it onto the playlist for Air Alaska flights, and this time around I seem to have got some payments for UK Airlines playing it too! I'm not sure if this is one of those weird PRS things where they make guesses on where stuff gets played (e.g. if you have a song on BBC Radio you then sometimes get a payment for it getting played in GYMNASIA which, in the nicest possible way, is unlikely for most of my stuff) or whether it means that OTHER airlines have heard it and decided that yes, that IS the perfect song for airborne festivities.

Elsewhere there were various odd places for songs to be played, like Hey Hey 16K on the radio in Hong Kong, People Who Stand In The Door in Germany, Hey William in both China and Cyprus, and Work's All Right (if it's a proper job) in the US of A. I guess I can understand Hey Hey 16K being played somewhere (although did they have ZX Spectrums in Hong Kong?), but it is strange and also lovely when I see songs which SHALL WE SAY are not QUITE as well-known as others which are still getting airplay.

Strangest of all though was a (tiny) payment for Everybody Let's Get Together due to it being used in a Chilean version of 'Arrested Development' on Netflix! That can't be right, can it? I have a feeling this MAY be a mis-categorisation by PRS, in which case I will happily be deducted my 42p in earnings next time around, but still, it's a rather fabulous thought that that tiny song which I initially wrote decades ago as yet another failed attempt at an ADVERT commission could eventually find it's way into the background of a TV show on the other side of the world. Even if it didn't!

posted 15/10/2026 by MJ Hibbett

< previous