Here’s Video 3 in my series showing you how to claim PPL UK Income. In this video, I show you how to add your evidence to support the claims. The evidence is for tracks from the Bach Motets CD that I recorded as a member of the Monteverdi Choir. It seemed a good one to claim for, as it won a Grammy, is a best seller and has had lots of plays on the radio.

PPLUK is the professional body that licenses recorded music played in public and broadcast on radio, TV and the Internet. It collects royalties and holds them until a PPL member claims them. Once you make a claim it then pays you any moneys owing and goes on to monitor airplay and pays any ongoing revenue to the claimant. If you have conducted, sung or played on a recording, even if you were only one of an 80-piece choir or a large orchestra, there may be some money owed to you.

In my experience, the website is quite difficult to navigate and the search process often comes up with a result that denies that the recordings even existed – even though you know they do!

Many musicians find the process overwhelming and turn to people who offer services making claims for you. Quite correctly, they charge a percentage of money received and any ongoing earnings.

I admit it can be very time consuming and confusing doing your first claim and adding new claims – especially it often takes a while for the record company to register the recording in order for you to be able to claim. If you do have the time and patience to do your own claims then you’ll receive ALL of the income due to you, both now and in the future.

Let’s face it, with our employment being so erratic, time is often the thing that we are rich in.

My advice is – keep you BPI and Pact forms and spend a windy, rainy day a couple of times a year checking for new repertoire.

There are currently five videos in the series and if you would like help with any other aspect of PPL, please email me and I’ll do another video for you!

Update 09/01/2014: This good news arrived today by email from the very helpful people at PPL.

It’s a reply to an email I sent  to them after making this video. I was pleading with them once again to add a button to ‘go to next claim’ or ‘go back to the claims list’ (as I explain in the video). At the moment, even if you’re playing or singing on a whole album, you have to attach the same evidence to every single track then press return many times to get back to the main list.  When the website closed for a few months a couple of years ago for a big update, I hoped this would be fixed as it seemed so obvious – sadly it wasn’t. Here is the latest update:

“We are in the process of updating the attaching evidence screens so you will be able to attach the same document to multiple claims in one go without having to keep going back to the list. We hope this will be available in the next few months which hopefully will make the process a bit less complicated.”

Lets hope it comes a bit quicker than a few months!

Here is the link to Video 2 where I show you how to navigate the PPL Claims basket and complete your claim.

In Video 4 I show you other ways to search for your PPL repertoire tracks.