Societies to strengthen alliance.

MCPS-PRS CEO Steve Porter has added new impetus to the long-debated subject of his organisation working more closely with PPL by revealing it as the Alliance's top priority.

Closer liaison between the two UK collection societies has long been mooted, but Porter used last week's MPA AGM and the PRS AGM to reveal publicly that it is now at the top of the Alliance's agenda.

"PPL is a great organisation that does an awful lot of things we do," he told the MPA AGM, which took place last Tuesday in the Alliance's London offices.

"In some areas they do it better and in some we do. There's scope for the two organisations to work together more closely in a whole series of areas. It's right at the top of the list of priorities for our organisation."

As Porter explains to Music Week, MCPS-PRS is already engaged in a series of partnerships, including with Swedish society Stim to develop a new commercial service centre for rights administration, with Germany's Gema for pan-European online licensing and with Nielsen Music Control to monitor which tracks commercial radio stations are playing. However, PPL is the obvious potential partner.

"We all get excited about partnering in Europe and ignore the fact that half a mile down the road there is PPL, which pretty much does everything we do," he says. "There is a certain amount of mirroring of the two organisations and most of our stakeholders and customers are similar."

Porter says the two organisations already do a lot of work together, but believes this could be taken much further.