Originally posted by johnwesleybarker:
Interesting feline1. You seem knowledgeable about things PPL. I have not received a penny in PPL for my work on Metamatic. Or any other money for that matter. I was paid Ģ30 per day in cash. Money and music don't mix, at least not in my life. If you know of a way for me to get any more money out of Metamatic every little bit would be appreciated.
Visit my Homepage 2.0 Well, I've been making music for years and I dunno if I've ever even made Ģ30 *ever*, never mind per day LOL and certainly have never played on any famous records yet!
But I do know how all that PPL/PRS/MCPS etc etc gubbins works I suppose.
Sure, you can read about it on the
http://www.ppluk.com/ website - the section you wanna click on is "PERFORMERS". I suspect you are already a PPL Performer member though? (cos I see you linked in on their CatCo database against those tracks, plus some Heaven 17 and other stuff...).
If you're not a PPL performer member, you should be! It's FREE to join! Get in! :p
The thing with this whole PPL Performer Royalties stuff (which only came into being in the late 1990s, I think? Due to some new EU rule?) is that although in *principle*, any time a recording is played on the telly or radio or a dentist's waiting room etc etc, performers are meant to get a few pennies in royalties (instead of it just being the songwriters and the record company) - but in *PRACTICE*, it'll only work if (a) the performer in question is a member of PPL and (b) the recording has an ISRC number and is logged in PPL's CatCo database with all the performers listed.
One of the obstacles to this is that performers can't register recordings and their performances themselves (or even search PPL's CatCo database to check it!) - instead, data is only fed into CatCo by *record companies*. Since the record companies often haven't bother to retrospectively go back through their old deleted back-catalogues and feed all the info into CatCo, many of these old records, which may actually quite routinely get a modest bit of airplay, aren't properly logged in the database at all and so nobody's getting any performer royalties on them

(I can only poke around in there cos I run a couple of tiny zero-budget labels myself.....)
PPL do maintain what they call an "Active Recordings List" (ARL), which is tracks that they've collected non-trivial amounts of cash for, but haven't managed to pay it to performers yet for the abovementioned reasons (a) and/or (b)...
I *think* when I did a search there on PPL's site that "Underpass" by John Foxx came up on what was the ARL, and it certainly had a flag saying "This Track is eligable for Express Claims", so if I were you I'd get on the blower to the PPL Performer Helpdesk (020 7534 1234) and "clarify your situation" with them...
I mean who knows - there seems to be a lot of grass roots discontent in the music bizz these days that these big collection societies are dubious behemoths who are pretty poor at getting the appropriate royalties to the little guys.
Surely to goodness you should be getting some stuff from PPL for things like Underpass, as it's even been on BBC2 on "ToTP2" etc, never mind radioplay...