Nutty, the logic goes as follows:

- the performer gets paid directly by the festival for performing i.e. singing (whatever songs); he/she then declares on the PRS forms which songs he/she did sing, so that the authors can get royalties.
- if the performer sings his/her own songs, he/she gets the related royalties. These are covered by the PRS licence fee that the festival pays.

So the festival pays two kinds of fees: a) performance fee (payment direct to artist) and b) licence for having the songs performed (payment to author via PRS). Both of these are in turn covered by the festival ticket price.

If I get booked at a festival and sing a Keith Marsden song, I don't get paid PRS royalties of course - just the performance fee. Conversely, if Vin Garbutt sings the Flowers & the Guns, I get paid the royalties even if I did not appear at the festival.

The moral is: The more you request the Flowers & the Guns from Vin, the more pennies I get! It's about a pint's worth, so let me know and I'll buy you the pint!

Chris, it has been common practice not to licence CDs for small initial runs. In any case, the recording (MCPS) licence fee goes directly to the authors of the songs, after MCPS takes its 15% admin slice. That works out at something like 4p per song and per copy - or £20 per song for your run of 500. So that's how much the authors are "short" since you didn't licence the CD from MCPS - no huge amount. Still, every time the track is played on the radio (whether the CD was MCPS-licenced or not is immaterial), the author will get the PRS royalties for airplay anyway.

In my case, IF I had not licenced my first 4 albums from MCPS (I am NOT saying that I didn't mind you, far be it from me etc etc) then one could have argued that as I was the author of the songs I would only be doing myself out of the £20 or so per track for the licence. Not quite true of course, because I would also be doing MCPS out of their 15% cut; but hey, I MIGHT have thought, they were big boys and could afford to lose their £12 share for the tiny 200-CD runs that I did. But I didn't do that, so that's all right...