Independent, and on your side.
Music Licence Consulting is an independent UK consultancy. We help businesses make sense of TheMusicLicence, the combined PPL and PRS for Music licence, check whether the bill is right, get them onto the correct, lowest compliant tariff, and explain the whole thing in plain English. No savings, no fee.
MLC was founded by Matt Mayo, who has spent more than a decade managing creative and commercial projects in the UK music industry. He has negotiated sync and usage-rights deals with music supervisors, agents and labels, advised musicians and small businesses on copyright and commercial licensing terms, and built and registered music rights portfolios with PRS, PPL and international bodies. That includes two years as a Corporate Licensing Manager at PPL PRS, setting up and pricing TheMusicLicence for businesses of every kind, from single pubs, gyms and salons to national hotel, restaurant and retail brands. So he has seen music licensing from every side: the rights holder being paid, the licensing body setting the bill, and the business paying it. He knows how these licences are quoted, assessed and priced, and where billing errors creep in. Now he works independently, on your side. You can check the company on Companies House and him on LinkedIn before you send us anything.
We started MLC because of a pattern we kept seeing. Most business owners are perfectly happy to pay their fair share: they know artists should be paid. What wears them down is the way it arrives: an unexpected letter, a backdated demand, a bill they can’t make sense of, and the feeling of being pressured or singled out. Smaller businesses feel it hardest, precisely because they don’t have a team to unpick licensing rules. So we do that part for them.
That’s why every relationship starts with listening. Before we talk about audits or savings, we want to understand your situation, and quite often the most valuable thing we do is simply explain, calmly and clearly, what’s actually going on and what your options are.
What we actually check
Here's the important distinction: we check whether the published price was applied correctly to your premises, not whether the price itself is fair. Wrong tariff class, over-stated audible area, stale occupancy or class-count data, duplicate or closed sites: these are factual misapplications of the published rates, and they're exactly what a review puts right. It's a more precise, and more winnable, question than “is this fair?”, and where a charge turns out to have been applied incorrectly there's even a free, government-backed escalation route many businesses don't know exists: the Dispute Resolution Ombudsman, which covers being “charged incorrectly for TheMusicLicence”.
How to check us out
We ask businesses to send us financial documents, so here is everything you need to verify who you are dealing with before you do.
What we will never do: ask for your bank or card details, ask for your PPL PRS account password, or contact the licensing body about your account without your written authority.
What we stand for
What we don’t do
We’re not here to help anyone dodge a licence they genuinely need: that risks enforcement and isn’t what we’re about. And we’re not a royalty-free workaround that asks you to change your music. Our job is simpler and more honest than either: make sure you’re correctly licensed, on the lowest compliant tariff, and never paying a penny more than you should.
Want to talk it through?
Book a free Music-Licence Sanity Call. We’ll listen, check whether your bill is right, and tell you honestly what to do next, even if that’s nothing.
MLC is an independent consultancy. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or acting on behalf of PPL PRS Ltd, PRS for Music or PPL. “TheMusicLicence” is a registered trademark of its respective owner.