A huge financial battle is quietly developing around something that affects virtually every songwriter and publisher: mechanical royalty rates from streaming.
The Copyright Royalty Board's next Phonorecords V proceeding will determine the mechanical royalty rates paid by U.S. streaming services from 2028–2032.
And the money involved is enormous.
The Digital Media Association noted that U.S. music-publishing revenue has grown from approximately $5.6 billion in 2022 to $7.3 billion, a jump of more than 30%.
Now publishers, songwriters and streaming companies are fighting over how that money should be divided in the next five-year period.
The stakes are particularly high because even a tiny change in the per-stream rate can become millions of dollars when multiplied across billions of streams.
This isn't a flashy celebrity catalog sale; but financially, it could have a much larger long-term impact on the entire publishing industry.
Why it matters: Sometimes the biggest music-business deals aren't acquisitions. They're battles over how billions of dollars of future royalty revenue get divided.
https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/category/music-industry/publishing/
