Decoding the Global Songwriting Economy: Inside the New CISAC Collections Report and the Complex Architecture of Music Publishing Royalties

Global Collections Report 2025: A Landmark Year for Songwriter Royalties

The International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC), the worldwide umbrella organization representing songwriter and composer collecting societies, has published the latest edition of its highly anticipated Global Collections Report. Offering the industry’s most comprehensive diagnostic of how musical compositions—and their underlying publishing rights—generate income across international borders, the new release provides a multi-layered view of the contemporary music economy.

Based on newly compiled data from 2025, the report confirms that digital platforms continue to reign supreme as the largest revenue driver for songwriters, composers, and music publishers. In a historic shift, however, the report revealed that global income generated from live music and public performance has surpassed, for the very first time, the royalties historically paid out by traditional broadcasters.

Yet, beneath these headline findings lies a complex architecture of global royalty collection. The latest report introduces a major structural adjustment: the incorporation of data from the United States-based mechanical rights collecting society, The Mechanical Licensing Collective (The MLC). Because the United States remains the single largest music rights market in the world, integrating The MLC’s figures alters the global macroeconomic picture, illuminating both the immense scale of digital music consumption and the intricate legal mechanics that govern how creators get paid.

The Anatomy of a Global Report: Headline Figures and the US Factor

At first glance, the top-line digital income figure published in the 2025 report—reaching €6.4 billion—appears to represent a staggering 27.9% year-on-year increase compared to previous annual statistics. However, industry analysts emphasize that this jump must be contextualized. A substantial portion of this growth is an accounting artifact rather than purely organic market expansion: it marks the inaugural inclusion of comprehensive mechanical royalty data from The MLC.

When adjusting for this new inclusion to establish an apples-to-apples comparison between 2025 and 2024, the organic growth rate of digital royalties collected by CISAC member societies settles at a robust 11.2%. This distinction underscores a vital reality of the music business: while the CISAC report serves as an indispensable annual barometer for the songwriting sector, it does not capture every single dollar or euro earned by songwriters and publishers globally. Understanding what the report includes, what it deliberately excludes, and why those distinctions exist is essential for anyone analyzing the modern music economy.

To comprehend how money flows through the global music ecosystem, one must first understand the foundational division of labor between recorded music and musical compositions. In the recorded music sector—governed by master rights—roughly 10% of total generated revenue flows through collective licensing systems and neighboring rights organizations such as PPL in the UK or SoundExchange in the US. Conversely, in the publishing sector, the vast majority of income is collected, administered, and distributed by collective management organizations (CMOs) like PRS for Music in the UK or ASCAP and BMI in the US.

The Chronology of Reform: How the US Mechanical Market Changed the Equation

To fully grasp why The MLC’s data is only now appearing in CISAC’s reports, one must look back at a pivotal legislative milestone in modern music history: the passage of the US Music Modernization Act (MMA) in 2018.

Prior to the MMA, the US mechanical licensing system—governing the royalties paid when musical compositions are reproduced or streamed—was heavily fragmented, prone to litigation, and plagued by high administrative friction. The MMA sought to rectify this by establishing a centralized, quasi-governmental entity known as The Mechanical Licensing Collective. Tasked with administering a blanket mechanical license for digital music providers in the United States, The MLC began operations to streamline the matching and distribution of digital mechanical royalties.

Timeline of Key Regulatory and Reporting Milestones:

• 2018: The United States passes the Music Modernization Act (MMA), paving the way for sweeping reform in digital mechanical licensing and mandating the creation of a centralized mechanical licensing collective.
• 2021: The MLC officially launches its operations, beginning the monumental task of processing billions of lines of streaming data and matching historical and ongoing mechanical royalties in the world’s largest music market.
• 2023–2024: The MLC scales its distributions, achieving operational maturity and integrating its vast financial data sets into international frameworks.
• 2025: CISAC formally incorporates data from The MLC into its Global Collections Report for the first time, reshaping global digital revenue baselines and elevating reported figures.

Because The MLC was newly constructed in the wake of the 2018 legislation, it required time to achieve full integration into the international network of collecting societies. Its recent absorption into CISAC’s statistical framework reflects its growing maturity as a global stakeholder, while permanently altering the baseline of international collections data.

Direct Deals, Sync, and the Great Blind Spots in Publishing Data

Despite the breadth of the CISAC report, a significant ecosystem of music publishing revenue operates entirely outside the collective management framework. These alternative income streams flow directly between creators, publishers, and commercial users.

Take, for instance, synchronization (sync) licensing—the process of pairing musical compositions with visual media such as motion pictures, video games, television advertisements, and branded content. The initial upfront sync fee is almost universally negotiated directly by the music publisher on behalf of the songwriter. The publisher collects these fees directly and distributes the agreed-upon royalty split straight to the creator. While secondary royalties—such as performance royalties generated when a movie is subsequently broadcast, streamed, or screened in a cinema—may eventually pass through collecting societies, the lucrative upfront synchronization fees are absent from CISAC’s tabulations.

Television broadcasting provides another prime example of divergent mechanics. In most international territories, traditional television broadcasters operate under broad blanket licenses issued by local performing rights organizations. These collections are cleanly captured in the broadcast category of CISAC’s annual audit. However, in the United States, television sync deals frequently originate through direct negotiations managed by publishers. As the television landscape has globalized through subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) platforms like Netflix, Apple TV+, and Amazon Prime Video, an increasing volume of revenue bypasses traditional CMOs in favor of direct, publisher-led licensing agreements.

Streaming: The Complex Interplay Between Performing and Mechanical Rights

The most intricate labyrinth in modern music publishing data involves music streaming services. On platforms like Spotify and Apple Music, as well as user-generated content and social media networks like YouTube and TikTok, the flow of money depends heavily on the specific repertoire involved and regional legal frameworks.

For much of the global repertoire, licensing and collections are managed entirely through collecting societies. In these instances, 100% of the digital royalties flow through CMOs and are fully cataloged in CISAC’s reports.

However, for Anglo-American repertoire (music originating from the US and UK), major and independent publishers frequently bypass collecting societies in various international markets by negotiating direct digital deals with streaming services. When this happens, a substantial portion of the revenue stream never touches a traditional society’s bank account.

Yet, structural idiosyncrasies in music copyright law can create circular confusion. In copyright terms, a song is governed by two distinct bundles of rights:

1. Mechanical Rights: Triggered whenever a musical composition is copied, reproduced, or streamed digitally. Traditionally managed by mechanical rights societies (such as MCPS in the UK or directly by publishers).
2. Performing Rights: Triggered whenever a musical composition is publicly performed, broadcast, or communicated to the public via digital transmission. Managed by performing rights societies (such as PRS or ASCAP).

Because audio streaming inherently involves both copying the file to a server and transmitting it to a listener’s device, it exploits both mechanical and performing rights simultaneously. Consequently, even when a publisher negotiates a direct digital licensing deal for mechanical rights, a portion of the financial proceeds will still flow through a performing rights society because the streaming platform is concurrently utilizing the public performance right.

Add to this the unique compulsory mechanical licensing framework enforced in the United States via The MLC, and the global map of digital royalties becomes an exercise in institutional engineering.

Quantifying the Uncaptured: Industry Analyses and Future Implications

Recognizing that the CISAC report captures collective management data rather than total market revenue, various industry analysts, trade bodies, and economists regularly attempt to paint a complete picture of the global publishing economy.

Organizations such as the International Confederation of Music Publishers (ICMP) and media research firm MIDIA routinely publish complementary studies designed to quantify publisher revenues that fall outside the purview of collective societies. Similarly, economist Will Page produces an influential annual study evaluating the total economic footprint of the entire global music rights business. In his most recent analysis examining 2024 data, Page estimated that direct publisher revenues alone generated more than $4.6 billion.

Looking ahead, the music industry faces a transformative new frontier: artificial intelligence. As major music publishers and independent rights-holders begin negotiating licensing agreements with generative AI companies for model training and content generation, the monetization models are expected to mirror those of streaming. While some AI-related licensing income will inevitably be captured by collective societies in future editions of the CISAC report, a significant portion will undoubtedly flow through direct publisher-led arrangements, remaining outside the traditional collective reporting infrastructure.

Despite these structural gaps and blind spots, industry stakeholders widely agree that the CISAC Global Collections Report remains an indispensable instrument for decoding macro-level trends. By mapping the relative performance of diverse revenue streams across international borders, the report offers vital intelligence. According to the 2025 findings, the top three global revenue streams, ranked by scale, are digital, followed closely by live and public performance, and subsequently broadcast. Geographically, the three markets generating the highest volume of collections for local societies remain the United States, France, and the United Kingdom.

As the music business continues to evolve through technological disruption, streaming maturation, and artificial intelligence integration, reports like CISAC’s—viewed alongside direct-market data—will remain critical navigational tools for understanding the true economic value of the world’s songwriters and composers.