Tom - the law doesn't say you have to charge for performance of your songs, nor does it say you must use PRS to collect the royalties. If your songs are performed a significant number of time by others it makes sense to use this monopolistic organisation to collect your royalties. It is almost certainly crazy to use them to collect royalties from your own performances -- as long as all the songs you sing are not licenced to PRS. If just one is licenced to PRS they are going to demand the whole of their fee for the evening so you may as well collect your royalties. This must be illegal (PRS not you) as it is anti-competitive and monopolistic. Their venue licencing policy is very distasteful at the very minimum

One assumes that this policy should reflect the requirement of their members -- after all they promote themselves as some sort of co-operative/members club.

Are the PRS members reading this happy with the venue licencing policy of PRS? If your not it is your duty to get in contact with them and tell them you are unhappy -- PRS will take more notice of you than us whinging club organisers or venue operators.

BTW the other thing that stinks is if people pay to come in you pay 3% of the gate, if they don't you pay 6% of cost. This implies the margin on a music performance is 50% --- can't stop laughing at that idea.