Downloading Your Statement
Log into the PRS for Music member portal and go to your royalty statements section. Each quarterly statement is available as a CSV download. Click download, save it somewhere you can find it.
The file name usually includes the distribution period. Keep these files — they're your permanent record of earnings.
What You See When You Open It
Open the CSV in Excel, Google Sheets, or any spreadsheet application. You'll see a header row followed by potentially thousands of data rows. Each row represents a single royalty payment for one use of one work in one territory.
This means a single song that aired on three BBC channels will appear as three separate rows. A song used in five countries generates five rows. It adds up fast.
Key Columns Explained
While PRS may update their format occasionally, these are the columns you'll typically see:
- Work Title — your composition name as registered with PRS
- Distribution Type — the broad category: broadcast, online, live, international, general licensing
- Usage Type — more specific: background music, featured, theme, underscore
- Territory / Country — where the performance took place
- Royalty Amount — what you earned from this specific use
- CAE/IPI Number — your unique songwriter identifier
- Work Number — PRS's internal reference for the composition
- Publisher — if applicable, shows publisher share details
- Performance Date / Period — when the usage occurred
Why Spreadsheets Struggle
A typical active composer might receive 10,000-50,000 rows per quarter. Load a few years of statements and you're looking at hundreds of thousands of rows. Excel's limit is just over a million rows, but long before you hit that, it becomes painfully slow to filter, sort, and calculate.
Google Sheets fares even worse — it starts struggling around 50,000 rows. And neither tool is designed to combine multiple CSV files into one view.
If your PRS CSV is too large to work with comfortably, see our guide on what to do when your PRS CSV is too big for Excel.
What to Look For
Instead of trying to read every row, focus on the questions that matter:
- Which works earned the most this quarter?
- How much came from BBC vs other broadcasters?
- Are international royalties growing?
- Are all your registered works appearing?
- How does this quarter compare to the same quarter last year?
Answering these questions in a spreadsheet means writing formulas, creating pivot tables, and repeating the process every quarter. RoyaltyPro answers them the moment you drag in your CSV files.
For the full picture of what your statement contains, see our comprehensive PRS royalty statement guide.