PRS for Music hits the right note with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

PRS for Music, a world-leading music rights management organization, has announced the extension of its partnership with Oracle. By moving its royalty payment database to Oracle Exadata Database Service on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), PRS for Music has accelerated royalties’ payments to its 165,000 songwriter, composer, and music publisher members.

PRS for Music is the first collecting society globally to have migrated its data processing systems to OCI, which provides enhanced scalability, superior performance, high availability, enterprise security, and overall lower costs. These factors were instrumental in PRS for Music’s record-breaking £836 million of royalties paid out in 2022, a 23.5% increase on the previous year, plus a historical low 9.3% cost-to-income ratio.

In 2021 alone, 27 trillion lines of music data were processed by PRS for Music, an increase of over 500% compared to 2017. This burgeoning growth in the popularity of music streaming services and video-on-demand platforms will continue to dramatically increase, and the volumes of data which must be processed to identify which works have been played, will also grow. The impact of working with Oracle Exadata Database Service on OCI means that the correct music creators and publishers are paid the royalties they are due, which is the core of PRS for Music’s purpose. It also means that online scaling of resources will enable PRS for Music to quickly adjust consumption to match demand, without interrupting operations.

Through its Nexus program, PRS for Music continues to pioneer solutions to address the music industry’s data challenges, and the partnership with Oracle is a key component in the transition from managing data to delivering insight and analysis through data science platforms and services.

Oracle Exadata Database Service enables PRS for Music’s royalty payment database to run efficiently with high performance, scale, and flexibility. The database runs faster, securely optimizing transactions, processing, and analytics. The flexibility to adjust, analyse, and manage vast amounts of data as it comes in, without interruption, is critical to PRS for Music. Running the royalty payment database on OCI supports seamless network performance and gives the option to run a range of payment applications and services in a secure and highly available hosted environment.

Mark Krajewski - Managing Director, Strategic Alliances and Chief Information Officer, PRS for Music, said: “Working with Oracle to migrate our distribution systems to the cloud was a seismic shift in infrastructure for PRS for Music, and a landmark moment in our industry. We are the only CMO in the world to have embraced this market-leading service. Exadata Database Service on OCI has been a catalyst for our ambitious data strategy, and with cutting-edge technologies in place we can continue to pioneer new activities to define the future of music royalty management. We have more control over our data than ever before, allowing for better data-driven decision making and greater speed, transparency, and accuracy in royalty distributions.

“Oracle Exadata Database Service on OCI ensures that we are able to process the tens of trillions of lines of data we receive and gives us the capacity to focus on developing new processes and policies. This combined with the work that we do at PRS for Music, resulted in our record-breaking financial results last year and the acceleration of our journey to becoming a society which pays out £1 billion in royalties annually.”

“Customers are dealing with more data than ever before, and this is increasing at a daily rate,” said Nick Wallace, UK Cloud Leader, Oracle. “By leveraging the Exadata Database Service on OCI, PRS for Music is in a position where it can meet the growing volumes of data to ensure it continues to deliver a seamless service to its customers.”