In his 2026 AGM speech, Peter Leathem OBE sets out how PPL is combining service, investment and strategic growth to strengthen its support for performers and recording rightsholders in a fast-changing global music market.
Read the full speech below:
Hello everyone and thank you for joining us here today. Thank you to all my colleagues for their presentations, and thank you particularly to Richard, as he takes his first AGM as Chair. He is coming up for six months in the role now and has settled in remarkably well – as I am sure that our board members who are here today will also attest to.
AGMs are, by their nature, about looking back. But for me, they are just as much about looking forward: about taking stock of where we are as a business, how we are continuously evolving, and how we are positioning PPL to deliver for our members in a fast‑moving and increasingly complex music landscape.
Today, I want to briefly do all three.
PPL’s strategy is simple: deliver sustainable growth for our members by combining excellent service, disciplined cost management and robust risk control, while continuing to invest in the capabilities we need for the future.
Those three elements, service, cost and risk, are not trade‑offs. They are interdependent. When we get them right together, we unlock growth. If we get them wrong, it can create friction — for our members, our licensees, CMO customers and our people.
That thinking has shaped our strategic priorities and guided our delivery over 2025 and the first half of this year. As you have heard from the earlier presentations, we have made good progress on all of these, continuing on our journey to make our members’ experience as smooth as possible, reducing our cost to revenue ratio, and adding over £14m to our collections. In parallel, as Mark Douglas has set out, we have done this while delivering a change programme to develop the core systems which underpin how PPL operates, not just what it delivers.
It has always been my belief that continually improving our service quality, and managing a sensible cost base will lead to growth. It is superior service which helps us win and retain rightsholder mandates. It is a collaborative, customer-service led mindset which helps us maintain our global network of agreements with other CMOs, to ensure our rightsholders are paid when their music is played. And which helps us to negotiate deals with licensees which enable the use of recorded music in the UK at a fair price. Done well, these unlock growth, in both domestic and international markets.
Up in Leicester, PPL PRS, our joint venture with PRS for Music for public performance licensing, is now eight years old, and remains a strong engine for growth. I am personally working very closely with Greg Aiello, the MD, and his senior team on business strategy, together with some of my senior PPL colleagues. Alongside implementing a rolling programme of tariff development, we are working with Greg and his team to support their work on continually improving effectiveness and market penetration to increase revenue for our members.
Thank you to Greg and his team, and thank you Andrea Martin and the team at PRS for another year of working well together. Following the news that Andrea Martin will step down from her role as CEO at PRS later this year, all the team at PPL wish her the very best in her future endeavours.
We are proud of the joint entity we have built, and indeed we spend time sharing our experience and expertise with our counterparts overseas in order to drive international public performance growth. In 2025, IFPI figures show that more than a quarter of European recording rightsholders public performance revenue came from the UK, indicating a clear opportunity for growth in other major European markets. Increasing public performance collections in markets outside the UK benefits PPL, as our members’ performances and repertoire receive increased payments. We are using our influence to seek to make that happen, through organisations such as IFPI and SCAPR, as well as directly with other CMOs.
On the broadcast side, we know that to effectively and sustainably grow our members’ licensing revenues over the next five years, we need to both drive incremental revenue growth for our existing licensing business and proactively secure new opportunities. We are applying a sharp commercial focus to seeking out new routes to growth, executing assertively but fairly on what already exists, and exploring where we can broaden our licensing in the UK and internationally.
Regarding international, it was pleasing to mark 20 years of international collections by achieving our strongest collections to date, including our highest ever annual total for international recording rightsholder collections. From launching 20 years ago, we have now collected over £1billion in international revenue, and collections have almost doubled in the past decade. In that time we’ve seen partners and competitors grow up around us, and the marketplace has become more and more crowded as people have sought to emulate what we have built. It is not always an easy thing to keep millions of pounds flowing around the world, and we are clear that our deep understanding of the systems and processes of our CMO colleagues, the strength of our relationships, and our role in the global initiatives such as RDx and VRDB give us a clear advantage over others who seek to succeed in this field.
Of course, whilst it is always a privilege to stand up here and report our fifth consecutive year of PPL growth, it would not be credible – or useful – to pretend the journey has been straight forward. Over the past few years we have seen fast-paced change across the music industry. A turbulent international economic and political situation, the increasing recognition of the value of music as an asset class, and a huge increase in the volume and complexity of data across the piece, being further compounded by the penetration of AI into creators’ lives and society more widely.
All of these mean that we cannot rest on our laurels. I talked last year about my pride in PPL being a balanced organisation. One that balances the views of multiple stakeholder groups around its board table, one that balances an effective monopoly position with a commercial international offering, and one that recognises that, like when riding a bicycle, in order to stay balanced you must keep moving.
Whether that be constantly evolving internally to remain on the front foot, or representing members’ interests with credibility and authority in policy and industry debates, we recognise and own PPL’s role in sustaining and building a UK music ecosystem which can be greater than the sum of its parts.
I therefore use this opportunity to stand here today in front our members, partners and friends to be crystal clear in how ambitious I am for this organisation, and how fast we are adapting to the changes in the world around us to ensure that we achieve our vision to be the first choice globally for neighbouring rights royalty collections. We have no pretensions that we are perfect. We are proud of what we have achieved, whilst still having services we would like to improve. But as a leadership team we have a very clear vision of where we are going to build a world-class customer experience for our members and licensees, and in so doing, unlocking further growth.
Which brings me to our people.
Nothing we have achieved this year would have been possible without the commitment, professionalism and resilience of PPL’s employees. Our teams have managed business‑as‑usual delivery while supporting major change — often at pace, and often under pressure. That deserves recognition.
We are continuing to focus on building a service‑led, customer‑facing culture across ALL our teams, not just the people who pick up the phones on a daily basis, or represent us at events. A culture which understands both the creative community we serve and the commercial partners we license – and how they intersect.
That cultural tone matters. Because great service is not just about metrics or response times. It is about empathy, clarity and trust — and those are as important to members as any operational statistic.
I also believe it has never been more important. In a world where everyone is needing to embrace change at a faster pace than ever before, a strong culture and clear vision is fundamental to success.
Let me now turn to the year ahead.
The market will continue to evolve rapidly. We see ongoing shifts in consumption and distribution, accelerating technological disruption, and, rightfully, higher expectations from members about speed, data quality and transparency. In that environment, the role of a trusted, well‑governed collective management organisation becomes more important, not less.
And so, my team have a clear and focused set of priorities for 2026 and into 2027.
They include continuing to improve operational delivery and service quality; completing key elements of our investments in data, technology and analytics capabilities that support long‑term growth, and maintaining strong governance, resilience and financial discipline.
These are not short‑term fixes. They are foundational investments designed to ensure PPL remains fit for purpose — not just today, but for the decade ahead.
Let me close by returning to where I began.
I would like to thank our members, for their continued trust and engagement, our Board and Chair, for their challenge and support, and our teams, whose hard work underpins everything we do.
PPL’s long‑term ambition remains constant: to be a world‑class collective management organisation that delivers growing value for performers and recording rightsholders in a changing global music economy.
Thank you everyone for coming along today and thank you for listening.
Read the full breakdown of PPL’s performance in the Annual Review 2025.
