Music licensing means composers get a fair share of Christmas cheer

It is that time of year again. Across the UK, hundreds of amateur theatre groups are getting ready to stage their Christmas shows. Everywhere from Perth to Penzance, enthusiastic part-time performers are preparing for village hall variety shows, community centre singalongs and church room pantomimes. And, in most cases, music plays a massive part in the festive fun. 

If an amateur performance does include songs, though, it is vitally important that it does so legally by ensuring that it has the right licences in place – and that includes a licence to copy and arrange sheet music. Fortunately, such licences are easy to obtain through Printed Music Licensing Limited. 

“If a theatre group is putting on a pantomime and it includes several different songs, they will often buy one copy of the sheet music and photocopy it for everyone to use,” says Viki Smith, PMLL’s managing director. “Most of the time, they have no idea that they need permission to do that. If they do not have that permission, they could be opening themselves up to legal difficulties.” 

In the past, that permission would need to have been obtained from the music’s publisher directly for every individual song, resulting in a complex and time-consuming headache. Since its foundation in 2012, though, PMLL, which is owned by the Music Publishers Association, has made the process of obtaining permission quick, cheap and easy. It offers licences for schools, for higher education establishments and for amateur theatre groups via its Amateur Group Singing Licence. 

“Our licence works for both the group performing the music and the musicians who originally wrote it,” Smith says. “Theatre groups can copy sheet music, safe in the knowledge that they are doing so properly, and the composers who wrote that music in the first place are correctly remunerated.” 

PMLL represents most music publishers, covering about 97% of the market, meaning that its Amateur Group Singing Licence covers almost any song that an amateur theatre group might want to include in their show, from musical theatre classics to modern pop songs and beyond. 

Obtaining an Amateur Group Singing Licence is straightforward, too: groups just need to visit PMLL’s website, create an account via its portal and pay for the licence they require. Prices are low, starting at £2.50 per copy for up to five licensed works, and PMLL’s website has a handy calculator to help groups to estimate costs as well: a group of 10 performers singing eight licensed songs equals £60, for example. The money PMLL collects is then distributed to the music’s original creators via publishers. 

“Music is at the heart of amateur theatre and it is at the heart of everything we do here at PMLL,” says Smith. “We want amateur groups to include music in their shows because it adds such emotion and joy, but it is only fair that the writers and composers of the music get paid for their use of it. No one would make copies of a novel and share them with a book group. The same is true of music.” 

“If any amateur theatre group is including songs in their shows this Christmas, or at any time of year, I would urge them to get an Amateur Group Singing Licence so they can do so with confidence.”

For more information on PMLL’s Amateur Group Singing Licence, visit: www.pmll.org.uk