The Beggar's Opera piece satirised Italian opera, which had become popular in London. According to "The New York Times": "Gay wrote the work more as an anti-opera than an opera, one of its attractions to its 18th-century London public being its lampooning of the Italian opera style and the English public's fascination with it." Instead of the grand music and themes of opera, the work uses familiar tunes and characters that were ordinary people. Some of the songs were by opera composers like Handel, but only the most popular of these were used. The audience could hum along with the music and identify
PRS for Music Britico was founded in 1932 by Alphonse Tournier, specialising on collecting royalties in the UK on French and German musical copyright, and becoming the British Copyright Protection Association in 1962. This company, Britico, started to share computer facilities with PRS in 1970. PRS for Music administers the performance rights and mechanical rights of about 22million musical works on behalf of its songwriter, composer and publisher members and in 2015 processed over 2 trillion uses of music. PRS for Music licenses and collects royalties for its members' musical works whenever they are publicly performed, or recordings of them are broadcast, streamed