It doesn’t take much to anger Martin Lewis, from MoneySavingExpert, but if there’s one thing that seems to wind him up more than anything else, it’s people who just accept the renewal fees on their car insurance without shopping around.
When the time comes for an insurance policy to be renewed, car insurance companies will send a new premium quote, with the promise that the driver need not do anything to make the insurance cover tick over for another year. It’s nice and easy.
Never accept the first offer!
But… renewal premiums are usually a significant chunk more expensive than the best rates on the market: it is always worth shopping around, and drivers can usually save at least hundreds of pounds by going elsewhere.
These companies increase their profit margins by huge amounts each year, simply by appealing to our collective laziness. If you could get paid a three-figure sum for surfing the internet for half an hour, you’d do it – and those are the sorts of savings that are frequently on offer.
Blind renewal
Just accepting the renewal fee is known as a ‘blind renewal’, and it’s something that we see a lot of in the music licensing sector; businesses accepting their music licence renewal cost without fully checking it.
However, unlike with car insurance renewals, customers don’t have the opportunity to shop around, because there are no competing organisations to whom you can pay music licences.
This means typical licencees – pubs, clubs, hotels, bars, football clubs leisure clubs, etc – often believe they are faced with a simple choice: pay the licence, or stop playing music.
Very few possess the knowledge – or, more importantly, the time required – to comprehensively assess their own music use and work out whether or not their licence submission has been made correctly, which is where we can come in.
(As an aside, there are some who choose the illegal third option – playing music without paying the licence fee, but this will usually result in a court appearance and we emphatically recommend not taking this approach.)
Another way?
Yes! If you’ve received a music licence renewal, get in touch with us and we’ll let you know very quickly if a saving could be made. We believe we can help most organisations – we find errors with over 90% of declarations, and the savings tend to increase when a business is operating over several sites.
My Music Solutions will ensure your music licence renewal is calculated correctly and accurately. We take care of the paperwork and the admin, and make sure you are fully compliant.
We think it’s a no-brainer – why not give us a call and see if we can help?