PRS for Music to cover Africa through Orfium partnership

The new partnership expands PRS’s licensing coverage to music users based in Africa, providing access to tens of millions of works, including many of the most successful songs and compositions of today and the last century.

Comprehensive coverage provided by Orfium will extend to public performances, including live events, radio, cable TV as well as local and multinational online services.

Orfium will license the PRS repertoire and provide the underlying technology infrastructure. This relationship leverages the proprietary software platform built by Orfium, and is expected to drive key speed, discovery and cost efficiencies for PRS, which is expected to unlock value for its songwriter members.

In addition, the agreement will expand the global reach of PRS for Music’s Major Live Concert Service, a royalty collection service for large concerts, which will now be available for events held across Africa.

The partnership with Orfium will sit alongside an existing agreement with the Southern African Music Rights Organisation, the collecting society based in South Africa, for its home territories and provide the framework for PRS members to be paid for the use of their works.

PRS for Music’s chief international business officer, Sami Valkonen, said the agreement was designed to be flexible, ensuring it could adapt and offer innovative solutions in markets with considerable change and growth.

“The African music market is rapidly progressive, driven by a burgeoning homegrown music scene and a new generation of talented music creators,” he said. “Orfium has both the expertise and tools necessary to ensure that songwriters, composers and publishers are paid when their music is being used across the African continent.”

Orfium CEO Rob Wells said: “We’re incredibly excited to partner with PRS for Music. Orfium exists to support and improve the global entertainment ecosystem so that creators everywhere can be paid fairly for their work. Over the last three years, we have invested heavily in building a state-of-the-art rights management platform to support our partners in the licensing and remuneration of music rights in the entertainment industry. Orfium looks forward to working with PRS as their trusted partner to support this incredible region and contributing to Africa’s future as a high-growth music market.”

Orfium is a global technology leader solving the entertainment industry’s biggest challenges around digital music and broadcast rights management, cue sheets, data, and reporting. That company boasts industry-leading software and music reporting solutions to support creators, rightsholders, and media companies report and monetise usage.

PRS for Music, meanwhile, is one of the world’s leading collective management organisations representing the rights of more than 160 000 songwriters, composers and music publishers around the globe. In 2021, 27 trillion performances of music were reported to PRS for Music with £677.2m ($841m) paid out in royalties to its members.