Check Your Work Registrations
The most common reason for missing or low royalties: your works aren't registered correctly with PRS. If a composition isn't in the PRS database, or if it's registered under a slightly different title than what the broadcaster used, the royalty can't be matched to you.
Log into the PRS member portal and check that all your active works are registered with the correct titles, co-writer splits, and publisher details. This is the single most important thing you can do to protect your income.
Co-Writer Splits
If you co-wrote a piece with another composer, the royalties are divided according to the registered shares. A 50/50 split means you get half. If the shares were registered incorrectly — say 75/25 instead of 50/50 — you could be receiving less than you're owed.
Check the share splits on every co-written work in your PRS account. Corrections require agreement from all parties.
Missing Cue Sheets
Broadcasters are supposed to submit cue sheets to PRS listing every piece of music used in their programmes. If a cue sheet is late, incomplete, or missing your track, you won't get paid for that performance.
This is particularly common with:
- Smaller channels and online-only broadcasters
- Live TV where music is used spontaneously
- International broadcasts where the foreign broadcaster hasn't reported to their local society
Minimum Distribution Threshold
PRS has minimum thresholds below which royalties are held and rolled into a future distribution rather than paid out immediately. If you have many small individual payments, some may not appear until they accumulate above the threshold.
International Collection Delays
Royalties from performances outside the UK are collected by foreign collection societies and passed to PRS through reciprocal agreements. This process can take 12-18 months or longer. So if your music was played on German TV six months ago, you likely haven't seen that money yet — but it should arrive eventually.
Streaming Rates
Streaming royalties from Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube are collected by PRS, but the per-stream rates are very small. Even thousands of streams may produce modest PRS payments. This is the reality of streaming economics for performing rights — it's not a PRS issue specifically.
How to Investigate
The first step is understanding what you ARE being paid for. When you know which works, territories, and distribution types are generating income, you can spot the gaps — the BBC broadcast that should have paid but didn't, the territory that went quiet, the work that isn't showing up at all.
RoyaltyPro makes this investigation straightforward. Load your statements, filter by work or territory, and see exactly where your money is (and isn't) coming from. It's much faster than manually searching through a CSV.
For a broader overview, see our guide to understanding PRS statements.