We have had three clear choices: 1)  Become a music publishing company.  2)  License our own music directly. 3)  Negotiate with PRS for Music so that we could create, for the very first time, a ‘Single-Writer-License-Member’ (trips off the tongue eh?) So far, so good.
After almost two years of very odd, frustrating, laborious and, at times, confusing discussions with the societies, we decided that we would license our music directly, at least in the short term.
We are however hoping that, in time, we can agree terms with PRS / MCPS for them to represent the catalogue and we can license directly through them thus creating this rather long winded but revolutionary new title.
This will mean that each writer would be able to license their own compositions directly with PRS / MCPS, via Topline, (as long as they are members of MCPS) and take advantage of the facilities that only the publishing companies could do previously. It does remove the necessity of publishers, and the admin, and places the incentive firmly into the copyright owners hands to market and exploit their own catalogue alongside Topline.
But for now, while we wait for the corporates to update their antiquated and incomprehensible systems, we will be licensing the music directly here.