PRS, the UK collecting society that represents songwriters and music publishers, has seen off the proposed class action brought against it by Blur drummer Dave Rowntree, as the Court Of Appeal upholds an earlier decision to strike the case out. Though the society looks like it will be left more than £1.8 million out of pocket having incurred enormous legal costs over the four years it spent fighting the claim.

In a judgment handed down yesterday, Judge Robert Miles dismissed Rowntree’s appeal, with fellow judges Antony Zacaroli and Christopher Nugee agreeing, ending a dispute the society had been defending since 2022. And confirming that there is nothing unlawful in the way PRS shares out the royalties it collects but cannot match to a specific songwriter or publisher, at least in the context of the competition laws that were raised in this lawsuit.  

PRS welcomed the result, with a spokesperson saying the court had “once again recognised that this claim has no reasonable prospect of success”, describing the action as “fundamentally flawed” and “a complete misrepresentation of our policies from the outset”, and adding that, had the case proceeded, it would have seen “PRS members suing the society they collectively own, despite there being soaring costs attached”.

Those soaring costs, it turns out, are even more of a problem than they first looked. Yesterday’s win in the appeals court follows on from a bruising costs ruling earlier in the year, which did not go nearly as favourably for PRS. In March, the Tribunal that heard the original case assessed PRS’s recoverable costs at £750,000, against the £2.6 million the society said it spent defending the claim, leaving it around £1.8 million short.

How a case with such weak foundations got as far as it did, and cost as much as it did, is bound up in how it came about. One of the more striking features, raised in the Tribunal’s original August 2025 judgment, is that the claim was built before Rowntree was recruited to front it. 

The law firm Maitland Walker first contacted PRS about the dispute in February 2022, and had prepared the claim and lined up litigation funding before it identified Rowntree as a proposed class representative to front the case – the funding agreement was negotiated, though not activated, before he came on board.

That agreement was scrutinised at length when the case came before the Competition Appeal Tribunal, the specialist body that hears competition claims, with particular focus on the 30% compound interest payable to the funders – an arrangement the Tribunal’s chair, Justin Turner, called “mind boggling”. And which could have sent tens of millions of pounds of any eventual settlement to the funders, well beyond the actual costs of the action, which were estimated at around £17 million.

Rowntree changed horses midway through the proceedings, replacing Maitland Walker with the law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher between the first hearing in February 2025 and a further hearing that June, and seeking an adjournment as he did so. A switch the Tribunal described, drily, as “unexpected in the circumstances”, and which Rowntree told the court was necessary because he had lost confidence in his original lawyers and considered it his duty to the class he was representing.

For all the arguments about who assembled the case and how it was run, the substance of it came down to a single dispute about money. Rowntree’s lawsuit turned on what the industry calls ‘black box income’, a contentious and often misunderstood problem – money that flows into a collecting society where it is not clear which member should be paid, either because it is not known what music a licensee actually used, or because the ownership of that music has not been properly identified. 

Societies set rules for what happens to that money, and PRS, in common with others, distributes it pro rata – taking the pattern of payments where works and owners were identified, and applying the same proportions to the black box, so a writer who received 5% of matched income receives 5% of the unmatched pot.

Rowntree’s argument was that this system favours publishers at the expense of writers, because songwriter income is more likely than publisher income to end up in the black box in the first place. There are only a handful of large publishers in the UK, and PRS staff, he argued, are more likely to transcribe publisher details correctly because they are more familiar with the names, while publishers also have the resources to audit their statements and query payments in a way individual writers do not.

He further argued that publishers are often paid their share of overseas and some streaming income directly, by foreign societies and digital platforms, so that money never passes through PRS’s matching process – leaving PRS handling only the writer’s share of that income, which is the share that can go astray. 

If writer income disproportionately ends up in the black box, his argument ran, then the unmatched pot is disproportionately made up of money that began as writer royalties. So sharing it out in the same ratio as the matched income, where publishers take their standard cut, hands publishers a share of what was really writers’ money.

The fairer approach, he argued, would be to split the black box to reflect whose income actually fell into it, which would give writers more than pro rata does. The judges accepted he might well be right about that, agreeing it is arguable that a greater proportion of writers’ royalties than publishers’ royalties ends up unmatched. Exactly what should be done about that problem, though, is where Rowntree’s claim came unstuck – not least because he was unable to propose an alternative solution.

The problem, Judge Miles found, is that the black box exists because the information needed to allocate the money correctly is missing. The “true” distribution that would happen in a world of complete data, in his words, “is not and cannot be known”, so to show that the pro rata split is unfair, a claimant has to be able to point to a fairer alternative – a counterfactual – and Rowntree’s legal team were unable to produce one.

The only candidate they raised, a flat per-capita split of the black box, appeared in their skeleton argument for the Tribunal hearing but was dropped by their counsel and would in any case have left many songwriters worse off. 

The reason an alternative better system had not been advanced, Miles found, “is manifest: it is that the very data failure problem which has given rise to the black box royalties means that there is no plausible basis for suggesting a more accurate (let alone fairer) distribution”, and there was, he added, “no realistic basis for thinking that the processes of litigation will unearth more information, so the deficit will remain”.

The court also rejected the idea that songwriters could be treated as a single block losing out to publishers as a single block, pointing out that writers range from those whose songs have been played billions of times to those barely played at all, so that “writer members do not make up a monolithic class”, and that the greater likelihood of writers being hit by data errors on average tells you nothing about whether any individual writer loses out under pro rata. 

As Miles put it, “the assumed fact that the average writer was more prone to data errors than the average publisher does not support the case that pro rata division is inherently unfair”.

Nor did the court find any fault in how PRS goes about the matching. The society makes “reasonable and proportionate efforts” to get the money to the right people, the judges found, and “there is no criticism of these efforts or processes” – PRS attempts to match royalties manually down to a floor of £3, lowered from a previous £5, below which the cost of chasing a match outweighs the sum at stake.

So the appeal court’s dismissal of the lawsuit is undoubtedly a victory for PRS, and the judges’ comments have made clear that the courts do not find fault with the mechanisms the society uses. 

But the costs ruling, which predated the appeal, did not go nearly so well. PRS had asked to recover the £2.6 million it spent on the case. On 16 Mar, the Tribunal chair, Justin Turner, awarded it £750,000 – less than a third. He also turned down two further things PRS had asked for – to be paid on an indemnity basis, which would have allowed it to recover more of what it had reasonably spent in legal costs, and to be paid interest on the sum.

That leaves the society around £1.8 million out of pocket. When it first refused to certify the case, the Tribunal had warned that the class risked, in effect, suing itself – a claim brought in the name of songwriters has left the society those songwriters own with a bill it cannot pass to the other side.

That turned out to be more than a little prescient. Despite having successfully defeated the legal challenge, PRS is left massively out of pocket, with nearly £2 million in unrecoverable legal costs. That sum will have to be settled from the commission it takes on the income that passes through its books, which will presumably leave the society facing a shortfall elsewhere. 

In very real terms, nearly two million quid has been burnt fighting off a legal claim that, by the courts’ own assessment, could better have been sorted out by other means – money that could presumably have been better invested in other more valuable activities.

The Tribunal was explicit about what those other means were. When Maitland Walker first wrote to PRS in 2022, it said it did “not consider that any formal mediation or alternative dispute resolution is appropriate”, a stance the judges called “unfortunate and not in the interest of the class”. 

In 2023, PRS’s solicitors offered that members of its Members’ Council “would be willing to meet with your client” to discuss the distribution policy, but, in the Tribunal’s words, “the proposed class representative did not take up this invitation”. The one meeting that did take place, after proceedings had been issued, “did not resolve any issues”.

The Tribunal and the Court of Appeal have both found PRS’s method of sharing out unmatched royalties lawful, and both said a songwriter with this kind of grievance should take it to the society’s own committees rather than to court – the Members’ Council and the Distribution Committee – which have writers and publishers on them in equal number and which set the distribution rules. 

PRS made a point of welcoming that suggestion, noting the judges’ “specific reference to existing mechanisms to resolve any members’ concerns, including via the Members’ Council”.

In a statement reported by Sky News, Rowntree said the action had “succeeded in shining a light on the magnitude of PRS black box royalties”, and that he “would welcome the opportunity to work with the PRS to find ways to shrink the value of black box royalties for the benefits of its 160,000 songwriter members”. That offer to work with PRS is, of course, the very thing the society proposed in 2023 and he and his lawyers apparently declined. 

In his statement, Rowntree maintains that the black box is too large and that the money in it “belongs overwhelmingly to individual writers rather than publishers” – the substance of his original complaint. However, he says, he accepts “the decision of the Court Of Appeal that this complaint could not be dealt with as a question of competition law”. 

Rowntree could in principle now ask the Supreme Court to examine the case again, though he would first need permission to appeal, and that looks like a bit of a stretch. The Supreme Court hears cases that raise a point of law of general importance, rather than being a venue for disgruntled litigants taking another shot at things. 

The appeal court judges found that this case raised no aspect of competition law that was “either novel or developing”, and so with the claim now beaten at two levels and Rowntree’s funders already trimming their exposure to the costs, a further appeal would be a brave – or perhaps foolish – bet.

Quite why Rowntree and his legal team went to court in the first place – turning down the meetings, then running a case that took years and ran up millions in legal fees only to collapse at the first hurdle – is the biggest unanswered question of the whole proceeding.

Rowntree’s own role in this is its own puzzle. He did not start the claim – it was built and funded before he was brought in to front it – and the one point at which he visibly took the reins, sacking Maitland Walker mid-case and telling the court he had “lost confidence” in them and was acting out of “duty to the class”, reads like a man who had grown uneasy with how the case was being run in his name. 

Whether he understood at the outset what fronting an opt-out class action would involve, or what it might cost, only he can say. Though as a lawyer himself, he would have been a more savvy participant than your average songwriter. 

It’s certainly true that lots of songwriters have expressed concerns about the black box and how it is distributed over the years and have sometimes felt frustrated when seeking answers and reforms within their collecting societies, including PRS. And that will inevitably leave some writers looking for other ways to achieve reform, though legal action of this kind comes with all the issues the judges raised. 

And cynics might note that court proceedings, unlike a meeting of the Members’ Council, guaranteed Rowntree’s advisers and funders some chunky fees – though only Rowntree and his advisers will know what really drove the decision.

​