Executive Overview
Earlier this week, CISAC—the international confederation of societies of authors and composers representing songwriter collecting societies globally—released its highly anticipated Global Collections Report. Serving as the definitive health check for the international music publishing sector, the annual publication offers an unvarnished look at how musical compositions generate income across borders, mediums, and formats.
The newest edition, which collates data for the 2025 fiscal year, delivers a series of fascinating structural shifts within the global rights economy. Most notably, digital platforms retain their crown as the undisputed heavyweight champion of songwriter and publisher revenue generation. However, a historic milestone occurred lower down the ledger: for the first time since modern tracking began, income generated from the live and public performance of music outpaced the traditional royalties paid out by global broadcasters.
Yet, beneath these headline numbers lies a complex web of accounting anomalies, structural differences between the US and international markets, and billions of dollars in direct-to-publisher revenues that never touch a collecting society’s balance sheet. Chief among these adjustments is the integration of data from The MLC (The Mechanical Licensing Collective) for the very first time. Because the United States remains the single largest music rights market on earth, incorporating American mechanical rights data instantly inflated CISAC’s top-line figures, masking an organic growth rate that, while robust, requires careful deconstruction to fully understand.
This report will dissect the findings of the 2026 CISAC report, analyze the mechanics of collective versus direct licensing, explore the shifting tides of broadcast versus live performance revenue, and project how future economic frontiers—such as artificial intelligence—will reshape the valuation of musical composition copyrights.
Detailed Chronology: The Evolution of Global Collections and the MLC Integration
To fully grasp the numbers published in the 2026 report, it is necessary to retrace the administrative and legislative timeline that brought us to this juncture.
The Legislative Catalyst: The Music Modernization Act
The story of the 2025 data anomaly begins back in 2018 with the passage of the landmark Music Modernization Act (MMA) in the United States. Prior to the MMA, licensing mechanical rights for digital streaming in the US was plagued by legal ambiguities, high litigation risks, and a fragmented approach to royalty distribution. The MMA revolutionized this landscape by establishing a collective administrative body—The MLC—to streamline mechanical licensing for digital service providers (DSPs) operating in the US market.
Because The MLC was a newly forged entity, it spent its initial years establishing operational workflows, ingesting massive ownership databases, and resolving historic back-royalties. Consequently, it was not immediately integrated into the global reporting networks of international umbrella organizations like CISAC.
Bridging the Atlantic: The 2025/2026 Reporting Shift
For years, CISAC’s annual metrics omitted the vast mechanical revenue streams managed by The MLC simply because the organization had not yet completed the structural journey to full CISAC membership. That changed for the 2025 reporting cycle.
When CISAC published its Global Collections Report this week, the headline digital income figure skyrocketed to an eye-watering €6.4 billion—a staggering 27.9% increase compared to the top-line digital figure published in the previous year’s report.
However, industry analysts immediately recognized that a substantial portion of this leap was an optical illusion created by the inclusion of US mechanical data for the very first time. When economists and analysts strip away the newly added MLC figures to enable a true apples-to-apples comparison, the reality emerges: digital royalties collected by traditional CISAC member societies actually grew by a very healthy, yet fundamentally different, 11.2% year-on-year.
This chronological convergence highlights a crucial nuance for anyone studying the music economy: aggregate figures published by global trade bodies are deeply tethered to administrative milestones and regulatory integrations, requiring deep-dive analysis to distinguish organic market growth from administrative expansion.
Supporting Context & Metrics: Unpacking the Gaps in the Global Ledger
While the CISAC report provides an invaluable macro-level view of the songs business, it does not tell the whole story. Understanding what is and what is not* captured within its pages is essential for stakeholders navigating the modern music industry.
Collective Licensing vs. The Recorded Music Sector
To understand the limitations of CISAC’s data, one must contrast the publishing sector with the sound recording (master rights) sector. In the recorded music market, roughly 10% of total generated money flows through collective licensing systems and neighboring rights societies like PPL in the UK or SoundExchange in the US. The vast majority of master rights income is secured via direct licensing between record labels and streaming services, or via direct sync and distribution agreements.
Conversely, on the publishing side, the scales tip heavily in the opposite direction. The majority of composition revenue is collected and distributed by collective management organizations (CMOs) such as PRS for Music in the UK, ASCAP and BMI in the US, SACEM in France, and GEMA in Germany.
Yet, "the majority" still leaves billions of dollars operating outside the society ecosystem.
The Sync and Direct-Deal Blind Spots
Consider the synchronization market—the licensing of musical compositions for use in feature films, television shows, video games, and brand advertisements.
- Upfront Fees: When a music publisher negotiates a sync deal, the initial sync fee is almost universally negotiated directly between the publisher and the content producer. The publisher collects these funds directly and distributes the writer’s share straight to the songwriter. These upfront fees never pass through a collecting society and are consequently missing from CISAC’s data.
- Secondary Exploitation: While subsequent public performances of that film or television broadcast will eventually generate royalties that flow through traditional broadcast collecting societies, the foundational sync transaction remains invisible to CISAC.
Furthermore, the globalization of entertainment via subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) platforms like Netflix, Apple TV+, and Amazon Prime Video has accelerated publisher-led direct deals. While local societies frequently remain involved in blanket licensing for traditional terrestrial networks, modern streaming production workflows often rely on direct, multi-territory publisher negotiations.
The Streaming Labyrinth: Mechanicals, Performances, and Dual-Rights
Streaming is where the financial plumbing of the music industry becomes dizzyingly complex.
On platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, and TikTok, a consumer’s interaction with a song triggers two distinct copyrights:
- The Mechanical Right: The right to reproduce or copy the musical composition (historically tied to physical formats like vinyl and CDs, now applied to digital caching and streaming copies).
- The Performing Right: The right to publicly perform or communicate the composition to the public.
In many international territories outside the Anglo-American zone, collecting societies handle both rights seamlessly under centralized frameworks. However, in the UK and the US, Anglo-American publishers frequently leverage their market muscle to negotiate direct deals with digital service providers for mechanical rights (sometimes working through specialized sub-societies like MCPS in the UK, but often bypassing traditional collective frameworks entirely).
Despite these direct publisher-DSP deals, performing rights for those exact same streams often continue to flow through domestic collecting societies like PRS or ASCAP. This creates a hybrid financial ecosystem: a single stream generates a direct publisher payout for the mechanical slice, alongside a society-administered payout for the performance slice.
Add the US compulsory mechanical licensing framework administered by The MLC into this mix, and it becomes clear why international comparative analysis requires expert navigation.
Official Statements & Industry Analysis: Quantifying the Unseen Billions
Because CISAC’s data only tracks money flowing through the institutional pipes of its member societies, major trade groups and independent analysts regularly attempt to map the blind spots.
Organizations such as the ICMP (International Confederation of Music Publishers) and music research firm MIDIA consistently publish supplementary datasets aimed at quantifying the vast scale of direct-to-publisher revenues.
Perhaps most notably, independent economist Will Page produces an annual comprehensive study that seeks to place a definitive valuation on the entire global music rights business by capturing these missing revenue streams. In Page’s most recent exhaustive study—which examined full-year market data—direct publisher revenues outside the traditional collective framework accounted for an astonishing $4.6 billion.
Despite these structural gaps, industry leaders and trade bodies agree that the CISAC report remains the gold standard for tracking relative directional trends. According to the 2026 findings, the top three revenue streams for songwriters and publishers, ranked by sheer monetary volume, are:
- Digital (Streaming, downloads, and interactive web services)
- Live and Public Performance (Concerts, festivals, background music in venues, and retail spaces)
- Broadcast (Traditional television and radio transmission)
Geographically, the report highlights the undisputed titans of the global publishing economy. The three individual markets that collected the highest aggregate volumes of money through their local societies remain:
- The United States (Bolstered by massive domestic consumption and the integration of The MLC)
- France (Benefiting from robust cultural quotas and highly protective collective enforcement laws)
- The United Kingdom (Representing a powerhouse of global repertoire creation and efficient licensing structures)
Future Outlook: Artificial Intelligence and the Next Frontier of Collections
As the global music industry looks past the 2025/2026 data cycle toward the remainder of the decade, attention is turning rapidly toward the next great licensing frontier: Artificial Intelligence.
The rapid proliferation of generative AI platforms—which ingest vast corpuses of text, audio, and compositional data to train machine learning models—has initiated a high-stakes legal and commercial battleground. Music publishers and songwriter advocacy groups are actively negotiating licensing frameworks with AI developers to ensure that the unauthorized harvesting of copyrighted musical compositions is met with fair compensation.
Crucially, industry observers note that the monetization of AI training data will likely mirror the complex trajectory of streaming rights. Some elements of AI licensing will be channeled through collective management organizations, establishing blanket data-harvesting tariffs that will eventually be captured in future editions of the CISAC Global Collections Report. Conversely, major multinational publishers will inevitably execute multi-million-dollar direct licensing agreements with tech giants behind closed doors, keeping those substantial revenues firmly within the private corporate ledgers of the publishers themselves.
Consequently, while future CISAC reports will continue to serve as vital barometers for the health of digital streaming, live performance, and broadcast income, they will only ever tell part of the story. For songwriters, publishers, and financial investors alike, navigating the modern music rights economy will continue to require a dual-lens approach: reading the institutional ledger provided by CISAC, while looking beyond the margins to account for the billions generated in the shadows of direct commerce.
