MCPS spreads the mechanical load across specialists

From early 2027 IMRO, ICE Services and Maia Universe will handle international, online and sync collections respectively, while PRS for Music stays on member services — after a year that put £219.9 million into writers’ hands.

MCPS confirmed in late September that from early 2027 it will work directly with an expanded network of specialist partners, keeping its longstanding partnership with PRS for Music for member services, royalty distributions, licensing and day-to-day tasks, and placing defined briefs with three outside organisations.

IMRO takes international processing, revenue optimisation and collections. ICE Services is contracted for online licensing of streaming, downloads and AI platforms. Swedish start-up Maia Universe will handle automated licensing for synchronisation in advertisements, films and games. The shape of the arrangement is now plain: PRS for Music remains the home relationship for members; the specialist layer around it is what changes.

Victor Finn, chief executive of IMRO, said the appointment reflects the trust between the two organisations and IMRO’s international collections expertise. Seán Donegan, IMRO’s chief commercial officer, described it as a significant endorsement of IMRO’s international operation. Dan Gopal, chief commercial officer at PRS for Music, welcomed the new long-term partnership.

The sums in play are not small. MCPS has distributed more than £4.8 billion since 2000. In 2025 alone the figure was £219.9 million. How that money is licensed, matched and brought home — especially from platforms and territories outside the usual territories — is the practical problem the new contracts are meant to address.

Catalogues that keep earning

For the writers behind British and Irish rock, mechanical royalties are the quiet engine under the catalogue. When a track is streamed, downloaded or placed in a film, a game or an advertisement, the mechanical right is what turns that use into a payment for the songwriter and publisher. Efficiency at the collecting end is not an abstract industry matter; it is the difference between a catalogue that pays cleanly and one that leaks.

Roxy Music’s run is a working example of how deep that catalogue can go. Formed in 1971 by lead vocalist and principal songwriter Bryan Ferry and bassist Graham Simpson, the band recorded their first album in 1972 with saxophonist and oboist Andy Mackay, guitarist Phil Manzanera, drummer Paul Thompson and synthesiser player Brian Eno. The studio sequence that followed — For Your Pleasure and Stranded in 1973, Country Life in 1974, Siren in 1975 — fixed a body of work that has never left rotation. A first split came in 1976; the group returned for Manifesto in 1979 and split again in 1983. From 2001 Ferry, Mackay, Manzanera and Thompson reunited for the stage and have toured together intermittently since, including 2022 dates marking the fiftieth anniversary of the debut. As recently as 2025 the catalogue was still being opened for new listeners through a run of EPs — Art Rock, Ballads, Dancefloor, Deep Cuts, Futurist, Rockers — and the album Love Is The Drug. Every reproduction of that work on a service or in a sync is a mechanical event. The same is true across the English rock and pop writing that stations such as this one play every day, from early-seventies art rock through the bands that followed.

International collections have long been the harder stretch of that work: money earned outside the home territory has to be found, claimed and returned. Handing that brief to IMRO, whose own operation is built for cross-border collections, is the answer MCPS has chosen. Online and AI platforms, and the automated sync market, are the other pressure points — hence ICE Services and Maia Universe beside the Irish society.

What is due from early 2027

Nothing in the announcement undoes the PRS for Music relationship members already know. What arrives from early 2027 is the specialist split around it: IMRO on international processing and collections, ICE Services on streaming, downloads and AI, Maia Universe on automated sync. How quickly the new contracts settle into statements, and how cleanly writers see the difference on foreign and platform income, will only be clear once the system is running. For now the map is set, and the money already moving through MCPS shows why the map matters.