While I have focused mainly on culture here, there is a lot more work that needs to be developed. This includes administrative overhead, an inability to make decisions quickly due to arduous processes, and the need to update ways of working.
I’ll start this review by repeating a comment the CEO, Andrea, made at an all-company (optional) Q&A last year to “celebrate” International Women’s Day:
“Women should be more like men. I don’t think we need International Women’s Day.”
This tone-deaf and ignorant comment perfectly sums up Andrea’s leadership and her success in dismantling what was once a vibrant, cohesive workplace. PRS was never perfect, but the culture used to be genuinely special. Today, PRS wouldn’t recognise company culture if it hit it in the face with a baseball bat.
Bullying is rife and consistently not dealt with. Following a recent bullying review, leadership attempted to scapegoat an external partner whose behaviour has been well known and infamous for over 15 years, with no action taken during that time. Meanwhile, members of the leadership team actively bully employees at all levels, often in very public situations. The bullying clearly comes from the top down.
Over the last few years, the majority of senior hires have been brought in from outside the music industry. These leaders have imported a toxic, “city boy” corporate culture that is completely at odds with a creative, membership-led organisation. Institutional knowledge has been ignored, and long-serving staff with deep industry experience have been sidelined or pushed out.
The office is now soulless. People don’t really know each other, and most don’t want to come in and honestly, I don’t blame them.
After running a redundancy programme in January this year and promising everything would be completed and resolved by Q1, the company has gone back on this. Instead, further redundancy programmes have been quietly rolled out department by department throughout the year.
PRS has historically run on the goodwill of its staff. It was widely accepted that we were underpaid, but in return we had work-life balance and a brilliant culture. Over the last two years, that trade-off has disappeared. What remains is overwork, an increasingly corporate mindset, and the stripping back of benefits such as socials, support for DEI groups, and many of the things that made it feel like you worked in the music industry.
Events like PRS Presents, PRS Unplugged, and PRSestival have disappeared. The once-amazing Christmas gig, previously the highlight of the year after final distribution, has been undermined. It has turned into a pantomime led by the CEO, who insists on joining staff bands on stage, phone in hand, not knowing the words and miming along. It was amusing the first year. It is now embarrassing and disrespectful to staff who rehearse for weeks in their own time.
The Christmas gig is now also held in mid-November, while teams are still sprinting toward year-end deadlines. No one can relax or enjoy it knowing they have to return the next day to the fundamentals of distribution.
One of Andrea’s repeated phrases is “spend it like it’s your own money, we’re a membership organisation,” yet she insists on flying business class, even within Europe, breaking company protocol.
While leadership is now trying to quietly reinstate some of what was stripped away, such as fruit in the office and the company conference, the damage has already been done.
If you work in music, be warned. For most people, this no longer feels like a music company. It feels soulless, corporate, and disconnected from the industry it claims to represent.
