Town charity shop celebrates as music ban is lifted

Nov 4 2008 by Emma Davison, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

A CHARITY that was banned from playing music in its shops is celebrating its silence being broken.

The mental health charity Mind was forced to switch off the radio in all its charity shops – including its Huddersfield town centre branch – after being warned it risked a massive fine from the Performance Rights Society.

But after reaching a licence agreement with the society staff and customers can once again enjoy background music.

Mind’s shops were silenced in July, when all staff had to stop playing music in their donation sorting rooms.

The charity was also worried that it could be fined by the society, which collects royalties for songwriters and performers, for the last five years at a cost running into hundreds of thousands of pounds.

It couldn’t afford to divert such a huge amount of money away from its core work, so it had to ask its shops to remove their radios, which deprived staff and volunteers of music and the companionship it gave them.