Championing rights and rewards for music owners
PPL helps recording rights owners and performers get the royalties they deserve
Music matters. From big ballads to sweeping soundtracks, it connects us to people, places and points in time.
But who makes sure the recording owners and the performers behind the sounds we love benefit when we hear them, whether it’s on the radio, during a TV show or in a shop, gym or restaurant?
PPLUK (Phonographic Performance Limited) licenses the use of music for over 150,000 members, from record companies to household-name artists. It helps make sure royalties are paid to the right people whenever their recordings are played. In 2025, the company paid £277.7 million to performers and recording rightsholders.
With so many members, and so many ways to hear their work, keeping up isn’t easy. So, with support from Deloitte Legal, PPL decided to transform its tech.
A platform for fair payments
Talent, time and money go into creating the theme tunes to our lives. And when music is broadcast and played across multiple platforms and venues, making sure the rights owners are rightfully rewarded relies on data.
As a leading UK and international collection society, PPL pays hundreds of millions of pounds to its members, every year. It doesn’t take a profit; it just deducts its costs from the royalties it distributes.
The process starts with PPL receiving usage reports when broadcasters, music suppliers and businesses play tracks. It then matches the information with its database of more than 28 million commercially released recordings to determine where royalties are due. Payments can depend, for example, on where a piece of music is used, the amount of airplay it gets and even the size of the audience.
Matching has been highly automated for years, but in 2024, PPL made improving its system a priority.
“On average, PPL receives details for 45,000 new recordings each week, driving the need for a platform that can scale and match recordings and usage data quickly,” says PPL’s chief information officer, Mark Douglas.
An AI-powered platform would make it more accurate, more efficient and better able to handle larger volumes of data needed to help protect the rights of even more performers and recording rightsholders for many years to come.
“Working with Deloitte Legal’s expert team, PPL was able to ensure the agreement would be future-proofed for the continued increase in volume of recordings and the deployment of AI tools.”
Mark Douglas, Chief Information Office, PPL.
Setting the stage for change
Rather than a bespoke solution, PPL decided to leverage the expertise of an external provider that could deliver a more flexible Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) option. Through this model, it could pay a licence fee to a provider, avoiding significant upfront costs, while still accessing the latest technology.
PPL could also benefit from improvements the provider makes as it delivers similar services for other collecting societies around the world.
Deloitte Legal worked closely with PPL’s legal team to negotiate the agreement with the SaaS provider covering the licence, service and platform. We also supported the engagement of IT specialists to work alongside PPL’s internal experts to make sure the new solution would slot in seamlessly.
The team negotiated a master services agreement (MSA), which sits above individual statements of work for everything from discovery – where the provider went in to understand the IT environment and PPL’s requirements – to integration and upgrades.
“Work is done in phases, so by putting an MSA in place, you agree the key legal terms once, then have statements of work for the different phases,” explains Louis Wihl, a director in Deloitte Legal.
“Our expertise in complex technology contracting, particularly with SaaS models, helped PPL navigate critical issues around licensing, future use of data and the use of AI.”
From hurdles to high notes
Used for PPL’s September and December 2025 payment to more than 22,000 and 147,000 performers and recording rights holders respectively, the system is now operational.
“This approach enables PPL to match music usage and recordings more efficiently, with initial auto-match rates increasing by 23%,” Mark continues. “It removes unnecessary cost and duplication from the industry allowing more money to flow to rightsholders and performers.”
Louis adds: “We strongly believe in PPL’s mission that if you’ve invested in the creation of music, you deserve to be paid fairly when it’s played”.
“We were delighted to be involved in helping PPL make use of the latest technologies to make that happen.”
As music data becomes more complex, PPL will be able to scale its systems to keep pace with change. It will close gaps, reduce delays and get more royalties to its members.
PPL also supports other collecting societies, which means the improvements made here can help raise the bar globally.
