Blur drummer Dave Rowntree has lost his appeal in a proposed mass claim against PRS for Music over so-called black box royalties. These are royalties collected by PRS which cannot be matched to a particular song, writer or payee because the necessary data is missing or wrong. Rowntree argued that PRS’s method of distributing those sums unfairly disadvantaged songwriter members, potentially by up to £200m.
The Court of Appeal dismissed the challenge, leaving in place the Competition Appeal Tribunal’s earlier strike-out. Strike-out means a claim is stopped without a full trial because, in legal terms, it has no real prospect of success or is otherwise defective. It is the litigation equivalent of the bouncer looking at the guest list and shaking his head.
Songwriters often have good reasons to worry about opaque royalty systems. The problem was legal and evidential. If royalties are unidentified because the data needed to identify them is absent, the court wanted a plausible alternative method. Saying the current rule is unfair is one thing. Showing a fairer workable rule is another.
PRS distributes unidentified royalties pro rata, meaning in the same proportions as royalties it can identify and match. Rowntree’s case was that this favoured publishers over songwriters as a class. The court’s difficulty was that the missing information made any supposedly accurate distribution unknowable. If accurate information existed, the royalties would not be sitting in the black box in the first place.
For competition lawyers, the case is useful because it shows how proposed collective actions still need a legally coherent theory. The class action label does not rescue a claim from basic pleading problems. Big numbers help generate attention. They do not supply causation, loss or a counterfactual.
For the music industry, the ruling is less comforting than PRS may wish. The claim has failed, but the black box remains. Data problems in rights management are not glamorous, but they decide who gets paid. In creative industries, poor metadata is where art goes to become an accounting dispute.
The case also shows the growing appetite for competition-style mass claims in sectors far beyond banking and consumer goods. Platforms, collecting societies and data-heavy intermediaries should expect more challenges where large pools of money are allocated by rules members barely understand.
Rowntree’s claim has run out of road. The royalty data problem has not. The court closed the case, not the black box.
There is a plain lesson for claimant lawyers tempted by cultural-sector mass claims. The grievance may be real, and the market practice may look ugly, but the pleading still needs mechanics. Who lost what? Against what lawful alternative? By what route did the defendant cause the loss? Courts like indignation best when it arrives with a working spreadsheet. The chorus is optional; the evidence is not. Even rock stars need pleadings, numbers, logic and patience.
Author: Sophie Carrington
Leave a Reply