Earlier this week CISAC - the global organisation for songwriter collecting societies - published the latest edition of its ‘Global Collections Report’, which provides the best overview we have of how the music industry’s song copyrights, aka publishing rights, are generating income across the world.
The new report, collating data for 2025, confirmed that digital platforms are still by far the biggest revenue generator for songwriters and music publishers, while - for the first time - income from the live and public performance of music brought in more than royalties paid by broadcasters.
Income from digital platforms increased in 2025, though there is an important footnote to consider when comparing the digital income reported by CISAC in 2024 with the figure in the 2025 report, which is that CISAC’s annual stats did not previously include data from US mechanical rights collecting society The MLC. And now it does. And the US is the biggest music rights market in the world.
Which means while the top line digital income figure listed in the new report - €6.4 billion - is 27.9% up on what was listed in the last report, a decent portion of that increase is accounted for by the inclusion of MLC data for the first time. Remove the new MLC data for a better comparison between 2025 and 2024, and digital royalties collected by CISAC members were up 11.2% year-on-year.
This illustrates that - while the CISAC report is an important annual overview of the songs business - it doesn’t capture all of the revenue earned by songwriters and publishers, and it’s worth understanding what is and what is not included, and why.
The CISAC report basically captures money that flows through the collecting societies that represent songwriters and music publishers.
Whereas on the recordings side about 10% of the money generated by recorded music flows through the collective licensing system, and collecting societies like PPL and SoundExchange, on the songs side the majority of the money is collected and distributed by collecting societies like PRS and ASCAP.
But not all the money. For example, with sync - when songs are synchronised into movies, games, ads and brand content - the initial sync deal is usually negotiated by a music publisher, which directly collects the money and pays the songwriter their share.
There may be additional royalties that do go through the collecting societies - for example when a movie is subsequently screened, streamed or broadcast - but the upfront fees are not included in CISAC’s data.
With TV, in most countries traditional broadcasters use music under a blanket licence issued by a collecting society, and those payments are included in the broadcast category in CISAC’s report.
However, in the US sync deals with TV producers also begin with publisher-negotiated deals. And as the TV business has become more global with streaming platforms run by the likes of Netflix, Apple and Amazon, although societies are usually still involved, there are also more publisher-led direct deals not included in the CISAC figures.
And then there is steaming, where things get complicated.
With a lot of repertoire, everything is handled by the collecting societies, so all the money from music services like Spotify and Apple Music - and user-upload and social media platforms like YouTube and TikTok - flows through the societies and is captured in the CISAC data.
However, with some repertoire, especially Anglo-American repertoire, many publishers also negotiate direct deals in many markets around the world. Where that happens, a significant portion of income does not flow through the societies.
But, just to make things extra confusing, some of it actually does. That’s because of the way song copyrights are organised and managed in Anglo-American markets.
At a basic level, the so called mechanical rights in a song - exploited when music is copied onto physical discs or via digital platforms - are controlled by publishers, and the performing rights - exploited when music is performed, broadcast or made available online - are controlled by the collecting societies. Publishers sometimes then use societies to license the mechanical rights, like MCPS, but not always.
With streaming, music is both copied and made available online, which means both mechanical rights and performing rights are exploited. Therefore, even when a publisher negotiates a direct deal with a streaming service, some of the money will still flow through a collecting society like PRS because the streaming service is exploiting the performing rights as well as the mechanical rights.
And then, to add one final additional complexity, things work differently in the US, where there is a compulsory licence covering the mechanical rights, which is administered by The MLC, meaning the mechanical royalties paid by music streaming services in the US usually flow through that society.
The way mechanical royalties are paid by streaming services in the US was revamped following the 2018 Music Modernization Act, which resulted in the creation of The MLC, which didn’t previously exist. That's why, until this year, its data wasn’t included in the CISAC annual report, because the newly created MLC was still in the process of becoming a CISAC member.
Because the US is such a big market - and by far the biggest market for music rights - the mechanical royalties paid over by the streaming services there are significant, so including MLC data for the first time has quite an impact on the top line figures published by CISAC.
But remember, even with MLC data included, there is still sync and digital income not included in the CISAC report. And, as the music industry starts to do licensing deals with AI companies, things will work in a similar way to streaming, meaning some of that income will be captured in future CISAC reports, but some of it will flow direct to publishers and will therefore be excluded.
Various companies and organisations, including music publisher trade group ICMP and research company MIDIA, publish reports that seek to quantify the publisher revenues not captured by CISAC.
Economist Will Page also includes those additional revenues in his annual study seeking to put a value on the entire music rights business. In his most recent study, looking at 2024 data, Page reported that direct publisher revenues generated over $4.6 billion.
Nevertheless, while it’s useful to understand the gaps, the CISAC report is still a valuable guide to ongoing trends in the world of song rights, and gives us important insights into the relative performance of different revenue streams and markets.
And according to that report, the biggest three revenues, in order of size, are digital followed by live and public performance followed by broadcast. And the three markets with the highest amount of money collected by the local societies are the US, France and the UK.