Music copyright after collectivisation

This article is an attempt to reflect on the critical role of collectivisation in music copyright in the 20th century. It traces the initial struggles of the Performing Right Society (PRS) to explore how music copyright was constituted and how it handled the transition from rights to royalties in a context of rapidly changing technologies. In so doing, it follows the initial controversies around the ways in which specific tariffs affected musical labour, the development of litigation techniques and the establishment of bureaucratic infrastructures that connected musical data to rights. The argument is that copyright and collective management were constitutive of distinctive business activities that triggered what came to be defined as the "music industry". Our suggestion is that music copyright in Britain was anchored in practices and strategies developed by this emerging collective subject built around copyright, which, in turn, shaped the ways in which the industry imagined itself.