Blur star David Rowntree launches fresh bid to overturn ruling in £200m royalties battle
The drummer is claiming thousands of songwriters have missed out on payments
Blur drummer David Rowntree should be allowed to continue his legal battle over £200 million in music royalties to end the “structural bias” in how they are distributed, the Court of Appeal has been told.
Listen to this article
Mr Rowntree is seeking to bring a legal claim on behalf of 160,000 songwriters against the Performing Right Society (PRS), which collects royalties and distributes them to songwriters and producers.
The drummer claims that PRS pays “black box” royalties, also known as unidentified royalties, to music publishers, but not to songwriters, which his lawyers claim is “systematically and disproportionately biased”.
In August, the Competition Appeal Tribunal threw out the challenge, which Mr Rowntree claimed could see songwriters receive unpaid royalties of up to £200 million.
He is now challenging the decision at the Court of Appeal, with his lawyers telling a hearing on Thursday that the tribunal “erred in law” and should be ordered to reconsider its decision.
The PRS is opposing the appeal, with its barristers claiming that the challenge is “unsustainable” and that the legal action “is incoherent and discloses no arguable claim”.
In its ruling in August, the tribunal said that Mr Rowntree’s claim could not continue as he had not shown that all of the songwriters involved “share the common feature of being ‘owed’ black box royalties”.
It also found that it was not “unfair and abusive” for the PRS not to pay songwriters black box royalties, meaning the claim did not have a “reasonable prospect of success”.
The tribunal added that Mr Rowntree had not yet “identified a plausible approach” to how royalties owed to songwriters should be estimated.
But Tim Ward KC, for Mr Rowntree, said in written submissions for the appeal that songwriters “are entitled to have black box royalty revenues distributed in accordance with a lawful policy”, and that the current policy “unduly favours” publishers.
He said that Mr Rowntree did not need to prove at a preliminary stage that every songwriter had lost royalties as this “puts the cart before the horse”, and could be determined at a trial.
He added that instead, the songwriters shared an “interest in establishing a lawful methodology for the distribution of black box royalties and the revision of the PRS’s allegedly unfair distribution policy on a forward-looking basis”.
Mr Ward also said that the tribunal was wrong to find that the PRS’s decision not to pay royalties was not unfair or abusive, adding that the “unfair and unlawful” distribution system amounted to an “abuse of a dominant position” by the body.
Marie Demetriou KC, for PRS, said in court that there would “always be winners and losers” when it came to royalty payments.
She said: “PRS initially uses an automated process to identify works which matches about 90 percent of the works and then uses a manual matching process…the threshold for this used to be £5 but it has now been lowered to £3, so more of the initially unallocated royalties are subject to the manual matching process which results in a further 2.5 percent of works being matched.
"As I’ll show you in a moment, this is one example of PRS improving its processes over time which we say is wholly inconsistent with any notion that it’s behaving as a lazy monopolist that is exploiting its members.”
In written submissions, Meredith Pickford KC, also for PRS, said that the tribunal’s decision was “indubitably correct” and that Mr Rowntree “has not established an arguable actionable loss on the part of anyone”.
He said: “The dispute said to underlie the claim would, at most, be an issue for PRS members to debate when settling on PRS’s distribution policies.
“Mr Rowntree, as a PRS member, is free to seek to involve himself in PRS’s procedures that enable songwriter and publisher voices equally to be heard and their interests balanced; or if any class member were sufficiently concerned about the alleged disproportionality of a proportional distribution system, they could do so too, and could have done so already.”
Mr Pickford also said that the total legal costs of the proceedings were set to reach around £26 million.
The hearing before Lord Justice Nugee, Lord Justice Zacaroli and Lord Justice Miles is due to conclude later on Thursday.