How to Submit Setlists to PRS and Get Paid for Live Performance

Venues pay for a music licence. Part of that money is meant to reach the writers whose songs were actually performed. The mechanism connecting the two is a setlist submission, and if nobody files one, the money is distributed on other bases and your gig contributes nothing to your own income.

This applies to your own songs. Playing covers means the money goes to the people who wrote them, which is exactly how it should work.

What you need to submit

• The setlist — the works actually performed.

• The venue — name, address and postcode. The postcode matters, because it's how PRS matches your gig to a licensed venue.

• The date of the performance.

• Which works were written by which members, where that varies across the set.

Submissions are made online through your PRS membership account.

The deadlines

These are real and they're different by venue type:

• Smaller UK venues — pubs, clubs, small rooms — 12 months from the date of the performance.

• Concert venues — 3 years from the date of the performance.

The 12-month one catches people. A year of pub gigs, unclaimed, expires quietly.

Only one person needs to submit

A useful thing many bands don't know: one copy of each setlist is enough. Royalties are paid according to the registered shares of each work, not according to who filed the paperwork. So the drummer submitting doesn't mean the drummer gets the money — the registered writers do.

This means bands should nominate one person to file setlists, rather than everyone filing duplicates or, more commonly, everyone assuming someone else did.

The prerequisite everyone misses

The works must already be registered with PRS to be distributed against. A setlist full of unregistered songs produces nothing, because there's no registered work for the money to attach to.

So the order is: join PRS, register your songs, then submit setlists. Doing the third without the second is the most common way this fails. See how to register with PRS.

Expect spot checks

PRS carries out checks against the setlist and event information submitted, and may contact the venue's promoter or licensee to verify that a performance took place. That's a reason to submit accurately rather than optimistically — file the gigs you actually played, with the songs you actually performed.

Make it a habit, not an archaeology project

The practical problem is memory. Filing twelve months of gigs in one session means reconstructing dates, venues, postcodes and running orders from photos and messages, which is exactly the kind of task that gets postponed until the deadline passes.

Musavise's setlist tool keeps each setlist attached to the gig it was played at, with the venue and date already recorded, so what you need for a PRS submission is a page you can read rather than a year you have to reconstruct. Setlists print and share, and the gig tracker holds the venue details alongside.

All of it lives in one free Musavise account — free means free, within honest limits, and your data exports whenever you want it. Create your free account; it takes about two minutes.