Guides
CWR for PRS for Music
PRS for Music administers performance and mechanical rights in United Kingdom. The UK society for performance rights and, through MCPS, mechanicals.
History
The Performing Right Society was founded in 1914; MCPS, its mechanical sibling, dates to 1924. Allied since 1997 and branded PRS for Music since 2009, the pair license virtually all commercially released music in the UK.
CWR at PRS for Music
PRS was among CWR's earliest and heaviest users — UK publishers were registering by CWR in the 2000s — and in 2010 it co-founded the ICE works database with STIM (GEMA joined in 2012). A CWR delivery today lands in ICE, whose validation rules are the ones that accept or bounce the file.
The works database behind PRS for Music is operated by ICE Services (owned by PRS, GEMA, and STIM): your CWR lands in the shared ICE database, and ICE's validation rules are the ones that accept or bounce it. Like nearly every CISAC society, PRS for Music works in the CWR 2.1 / 2.2 era — the versions in production use worldwide since the standard displaced the proprietary registration formats of the 1990s. Per-society delivery profiles do change, so confirm the current version and any local quirks before a first delivery.
Related societies
Check a CWR file free — errors and warnings tied to the exact line, nothing stored: cwrcheck.com.