PRS for Music Licensed Its Repertoire Across Africa Through Orfium in 2023. Its Own Partner Society List Still Names Only One African Country.

On 17 April 2023 PRS for Music announced that Orfium, a Los Angeles technology company, would license the PRS repertoire to music users across the African continent. What changed hands was a licensing mandate, not a catalogue. PRS members keep their copyrights, PRS keeps the member relationship, and Orfium became the party that grants licences and serves the market in Africa for public performance, live events, radio, cable television, and local and certain multinational online services. No consideration, commission rate or term appears in either party’s announcement. Three and a half years later, PRS for Music’s own international partner societies page lists exactly one African country.

What Orfium was licensed, and what it was not

The operative sentence in PRS for Music’s own announcement is short and unusually clear: “Orfium will license the PRS repertoire and provide the underlying technology infrastructure used to serve these markets in a highly efficient manner.”

Read it carefully: the four verbs that matter in rights reporting are all in play and only one applies. Orfium does not own the works. It does not administer them, in the sense a publisher or a society administers a writer’s copyright, because PRS remains the collective management organisation and the members remain PRS members. It does not distribute recordings, because this agreement concerns compositions rather than masters and PRS holds no master rights to give. What Orfium holds is the right to grant licences in Africa over repertoire that belongs to someone else, plus the platform used to run the operation. It is a licensing mandate with a technology layer attached.

The scope in the announcement is specific. Coverage “will extend to public performances (including live events), radio, cable TV as well as local and certain multinational online services.” PRS describes the repertoire reached as “tens of millions of works”. Separately, the same document extends PRS for Music’s Major Live Concert Service, its royalty collection service for large concerts, to “events held across Africa”.

The phrase “certain multinational online services” is doing quiet work. It concedes that some multinational digital services are not covered, and no document checked names which are in and which are out. That is a material gap for anyone working out whether a given stream in a given African market is licensed here.

The resolving document names one African country

PRS for Music publishes its own list of international partner societies, the reciprocal counterparts through which it collects abroad and they collect in the United Kingdom. That page, read on 27 October 2026, carries 89 country-to-society entries covering 87 distinct territories. The United States appears three times, once each for ASCAP, BMI and SESAC.

Exactly one African country appears on it: South Africa, represented by SAMRO. Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Egypt, Morocco, Senegal, Zimbabwe, Angola and the other 46 African territories are absent.

That absence is not an oversight on PRS’s part, and the 2023 announcement effectively says so. The partnership, it reads, “will sit alongside the existing agreement with SAMRO, the collecting society based in South Africa, for its home territories and provide the framework for PRS members to be paid, when their works are used in some of world’s fast growing music markets.” In other words, PRS’s society-to-society network in Africa is SAMRO and nothing else, and the Orfium mandate is what covers the remainder of the continent. The structural finding is that PRS reached 56 African territories through a commercial technology vendor rather than through African collecting societies.

One figure in the announcement does not reconcile with PRS’s own published list. The release says PRS’s international team “manage agreements in over 100 countries worldwide”. The partner societies page lists 87 territories. No PRS document checked explains the gap, and it is recorded here as unresolved.

Two parties, two dates, one re-rendered page

The two counterparties date their own announcement of the same agreement three days apart. The machine-readable publish date embedded in PRS for Music’s press page is 17 April 2023 at 08:00. Orfium’s own news post carries a published date of 20 April 2023 at 16:59 and a modified date two minutes later. Neither party’s document acknowledges the other’s date. For a record that will be cited as the origin point of PRS licensing in Africa, the discrepancy is worth stating rather than averaging.

There is a second reason to be careful about citing the PRS page as a 2023 artefact. The version served today is a later rebuild of the original. Its “About PRS for Music” boilerplate reports that “In 2024, PRS for Music paid out 1.02 billion pounds in royalties and collected a record 1.15 billion pounds in revenues”, figures that did not exist in April 2023. The content-management identifiers attached to its embedded images encode dates in February and April 2026. The document retains a 2023 publish date and has been edited since.

The same page also contradicts itself twice. Its image caption calls Sami Valkonen “PRS for Music Chief Business Officer”; the attribution under his quote calls him “Chief International Business Officer”. Its Orfium boilerplate describes a “team of 500+” against the 700-plus on Orfium’s own timeline.

Neither party’s name resolves to a single company

This record names the counterparties as the announcement names them, and the announcement names brands rather than legal persons. On the UK register, “PRS for Music” maps to several live companies, all at Goldings House, 2 Hays Lane, London SE1 2HB: Performing Right Society, Limited, number 00134396, incorporated on 6 March 1914; PRS for Music Limited, number 03444246, incorporated on 29 September 1997 and previously named Music Copyright Operational Services Limited; THE MCPS-PRS ALLIANCE LIMITED, number 06825354, which itself previously carried the PRS for Music name; and PRS for Music (USA) Limited, number 06805434.

On the Orfium side, the only company of that name anywhere on the UK register is Orfium UK Limited, number 13620326, incorporated on 14 September 2021 with a statement of capital of 100 pounds and classified under SIC 69109, activities of patent and copyright agents. Its registered office moved on 4 May 2023 to 26 Litchfield Street, London WC2H 9TZ. The only accounts it ever filed were small-company accounts made up to 31 December 2022. On 18 January 2024 five directors were terminated, including Robert Wells, the Orfium chief executive quoted in the PRS announcement, and two were appointed. A strike-off application was filed on 6 January 2025 and the company was dissolved by voluntary strike-off on 1 April 2025. SOUNDMOUSE USA LIMITED, number 08605863, was dissolved the same day from the same registered office.

None of that establishes anything about the PRS arrangement, and this record does not claim that it does. Orfium is a group with entities in the United States, Greece and Japan, and striking off a small dormant UK vehicle is routine housekeeping. The narrower point stands: the agreement licensing PRS repertoire across a continent has never been tied in public to a named contracting entity on either side.

The route PRS did not take

There is an established way for a licence to reach across Africa, and it is worth putting beside this one. When TikTok licensed compositions for African use in April 2021, its direct counterparties were SAMRO and CAPASSO in South Africa. Coverage of a further 58 African territories came from CAPASSO’s own pre-existing reciprocal representation agreements with 21 other national collecting societies, a network CAPASSO calls its Hub. The licence travelled society to society.

The PRS arrangement travels differently. The counterparty for an African music user seeking PRS repertoire is a private company accountable to its clients and shareholders rather than to a membership. Neither model is automatically better for a writer, and no claim is made here that one is. The two simply put the money through different hands under different audit and governance arrangements, none of which has been disclosed in this case.

What could not be established

Which Orfium legal entity is party to the agreement. Whether it remains in force in 2026: PRS for Music’s current international page makes no mention of Orfium or Africa, its 2025 financial results page makes no mention of either, and Orfium’s own corporate timeline and collecting-societies page make no mention of PRS or Africa. Any consideration, advance, commission rate or revenue split. The term, renewal or termination provisions. Which specific African territories are covered beyond the phrase “across Africa”. Which multinational online services fall inside “certain”. Whether any African collecting society other than SAMRO was offered or declined a reciprocal agreement with PRS. Each of these was looked for in both parties’ own published material and is excluded here rather than estimated.

What this means for artists

If you are a PRS member, including the large number of British-based Nigerian, Ghanaian and South African writers on its books, this is the mechanism by which you get paid when your song is performed at a concert in Lagos or played on radio in Nairobi. Before 2023 that money had no documented route home outside South Africa. The honest caveat is that no document shows what the collection costs you, because no commission rate has been published.

If you are an African songwriter who is not a PRS member, this arrangement does nothing for you. It is an inbound licence that brings foreign repertoire into African markets. It is not a route for African compositions to be collected abroad. That still depends on your own society holding a reciprocal agreement with PRS, and on PRS’s own published list, only SAMRO does.

If you promote shows, run a station or operate a service in an African market, your PRS licence since 2023 comes from a technology company rather than a local society. Two practical questions follow: which legal entity is actually granting you the licence, and whether the service you operate falls inside or outside the undefined category of “certain multinational online services”. Get both answered in writing before you rely on the licence.