Executive Overview
Earlier this week, CISAC (the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers)—the premier global umbrella organization for songwriter collecting societies—released the latest edition of its eagerly awaited Global Collections Report. Serving as the definitive barometer for the international music publishing sector, the report tracks how song copyrights (publishing rights) generate income across various territories, revenue streams, and platforms.
The newly published data, which aggregates collections for the 2025 calendar year, yields several notable structural insights. Most prominently, digital platforms remain by far the single largest engine of revenue growth for songwriters, composers, and music publishers worldwide. However, the report also highlights a historic milestone: for the very first time, combined income from the live and public performance of music has surpassed the royalties generated by traditional broadcasters.
Yet, beneath these headline trends lies a complex matrix of administrative revisions, structural industry shifts, and data gaps. Most notably, the 2025 top-line figures feature the inclusion of data from The MLC (The Mechanical Licensing Collective)—the US mechanical rights collecting society established in the wake of the 2018 Music Modernization Act. Because the United States represents the largest music rights market on earth, integrating The MLC into CISAC’s architecture creates an optical leap in year-over-year growth statistics.
While CISAC’s figures point to a roaring global market, they do not tell the whole story. A substantial portion of modern music publishing revenue bypasses collective management organizations (CMOs) entirely, flowing instead through direct deals negotiated between major and independent publishers and digital service providers (DSPs), sync buyers, or future-facing sectors like artificial intelligence. Understanding what the CISAC report captures—and crucially, what it leaves out—is essential for any serious stakeholder navigating the modern music economy.
Detailed Chronology: The Evolution of CISAC’s Data and the MLC Integration
To fully appreciate the figures published in the 2025 Global Collections Report, it is necessary to examine the historical trajectory of royalty collection and how reporting metrics have evolved.
The Path to The MLC Integration
For decades, CISAC’s annual statistical compendium has relied on direct reporting from its global network of member societies—such as PRS in the UK, ASCAP and BMI in the US, SACEM in France, and dozens of others. While these societies dominate the collection landscape for performance rights and traditional mechanical licensing, the United States long operated under a uniquely fragmented and heavily litigated mechanical licensing framework.
That framework was radically overhauled following the passage of the landmark Music Modernization Act (MMA) in 2018. The MMA streamlined the US digital mechanical licensing process by creating a centralized, quasi-governmental entity: The Mechanical Licensing Collective (The MLC). Charged with administering a blanket mechanical license for digital streaming providers in the US, The MLC began compiling vast pools of mechanical royalties.
Because The MLC was newly established, it took several years to fully operationalize, achieve institutional maturity, and integrate into the global network of international writer-and-publisher bodies. Consequently, previous iterations of CISAC’s annual reports did not incorporate data from The MLC.
The 2025 report marks a structural turning point because The MLC’s multi-billion-dollar pool of digital mechanical collections has finally been factored into CISAC’s global calculations.
Untangling the Growth Numbers
The inclusion of US mechanical data creates a profound statistical illusion for casual observers. On paper, CISAC’s new report lists total global digital income at an impressive €6.4 billion—representing a seemingly astronomical 27.9% year-on-year increase compared to the previous report.
However, industry analysts must look past the headline figure. A significant portion of that 27.9% surge is not organic growth, but rather an accounting artifact resulting from the retroactive and ongoing inclusion of The MLC’s massive US digital collections for the first time.
When researchers strip away the newly added MLC dataset to establish an apples-to-apples comparison between 2024 and 2025, a clearer picture emerges: digital royalties collected by legacy CISAC member societies actually grew by a very healthy, yet considerably more grounded, 11.2% year-on-year.
This distinction underscores a vital truth about the global music publishing business: while CISAC provides an invaluable macro-level overview, its annual snapshots require granular contextualization to separate administrative scope expansions from true market momentum.
Supporting Context & Metrics: Inside the Collecting Society Ecosystem
To understand why certain revenues appear in the CISAC report while others remain invisible, one must examine the fundamental mechanics of how money flows through the music industry.
Recordings vs. Songs: A Tale of Two Systems
A helpful point of comparison is the recorded music sector. On the master rights side, roughly 10% of total generated revenue flows through collective licensing systems—administered by neighboring rights societies like PPL in the UK or SoundExchange in the US. The remaining 90% is typically handled via direct distribution, record label contracts, and direct-to-consumer sales.
Conversely, the publishing side (songs) relies heavily on collective administration. The majority of global songwriting revenue is collected, pooled, and distributed by collective management organizations (CMOs) like PRS, ASCAP, GEMA, and JASRAC.
Yet, "the majority" is not all. Significant pillars of modern publishing revenue bypass these societies entirely, operating instead through direct negotiations between publishers and licensees.
The Sync and Broadcast Nuances
Take, for example, the synchronization (sync) market—the licensing of musical compositions for use in feature films, television shows, video games, commercials, and brand partnerships.
- The Upfront Deal: Initial sync fees are almost universally negotiated directly between a music publisher and the media producer. The publisher collects this upfront fee directly and pays out the songwriter’s contractual split without involving a collecting society. Consequently, these initial sync fees are entirely absent from CISAC’s data.
- The Tail End: While upfront sync fees bypass societies, downstream revenues do flow through them. If a film featuring a synchronized song is subsequently screened in cinemas, broadcast on television, or streamed globally, public performance royalties are triggered and collected via traditional CMO channels.
- Television & Streaming: Traditionally, television broadcasters operated under blanket licenses issued by local collecting societies, feeding reliably into the "broadcast" category of CISAC reports. However, the media landscape has been radically disrupted by global streaming giants like Netflix, Apple TV+, and Amazon Prime Video. While collecting societies remain involved in certain international territories, many streaming platforms negotiate direct, multi-territory blanket or transactional deals directly with major publishers, leaving portions of TV-related income outside CISAC’s view.
The Streaming Maze: Anglo-American Repertoire and Direct Deals
Streaming is the economic lifeblood of the modern music industry, yet its underlying plumbing is notoriously complex—particularly regarding how money routes from services like Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, and TikTok back to creators.
For much of the global repertoire, streaming income flows neatly through collecting societies. However, Anglo-American repertoire (songs originating from the US and UK) operates under a deeply hybrid model. Major and large independent publishers frequently negotiate direct digital licenses with DSPs in various international territories. Where these direct deals exist, a substantial portion of revenue circumvents traditional domestic societies.
However, compounding the confusion is the dual-rights structure of musical compositions:
- Mechanical Rights: Exploited when music is reproduced (copied onto physical discs or cached/streamed digitally). These are traditionally controlled directly by publishers, though they are sometimes sub-licensed to mechanical rights organizations like MCPS in the UK.
- Performing Rights: Exploited when music is performed publicly, broadcast, or communicated to the public online. These are universally controlled and licensed by performing rights organizations (PROs) like PRS, ASCAP, and BMI.
Because interactive music streaming constitutes both a reproduction (mechanical) and a public performance/communication to the public, both rights are triggered simultaneously. Therefore, even when a publisher negotiates a direct digital deal with a streaming service, a portion of the resulting cash flow still routes through collecting societies because the platform is utilizing the underlying performing rights.
Add to this the unique mechanics of the United States—where compulsory mechanical licenses are overseen by The MLC, creating an institutional firewall between US digital mechanical royalties and traditional international CMO collection networks—and it becomes clear why global publishing accounting is a labyrinth.
Official Statements and Industry Analysis
The release of the 2025 Global Collections Report has prompted widespread commentary across the music publishing community, with industry trade groups and independent analysts working to contextualize CISAC’s findings within the broader global macroeconomic picture.
Quantifying the Blind Spots
Because CISAC’s data is strictly bound to monies flowing through its member societies, major trade bodies and research firms routinely publish supplementary studies to capture the "dark matter" of music publishing—revenues generated outside the collecting society framework.
Organizations such as the International Confederation of Music Publishers (ICMP) and media research firm MIDIA regularly release market sizing reports designed to bridge the gap between CISAC figures and total industry turnover.
Prominent economist Will Page produces an influential annual study dedicated to valuing the entire global music rights business. In his most recent comprehensive breakdown analyzing 2024 figures, Page estimated that direct publisher revenues—monies secured entirely outside of collective management frameworks—generated over $4.6 billion.
When these direct publisher revenues, upfront sync buyouts, private-copy levies, and bespoke digital direct deals are added to CISAC’s €6.4 billion collective total, the true scale of the global publishing economy comes into sharper focus.
The Value of CISAC’s Benchmark
Despite these acknowledged blind spots, industry leaders maintain that the CISAC report remains an indispensable tool. Speaking on the release of the 2025 data, publishing executives and trade representatives emphasized that while the report does not capture 100% of every dollar earned, it remains the gold standard for tracking directional trends.
The report provides critical, unvarnished insight into:
- The relative performance and velocity of different revenue streams (such as the historic overtaking of broadcasting income by live and public performance).
- The geographic distribution of value across the globe. According to the 2025 findings, the three largest national markets by collection volume remain unchanged: the United States leads the pack, followed by France and the United Kingdom.
- Macroeconomic pressures affecting creator payouts, currency fluctuations, and emerging regional consumption habits.
Future Outlook: Artificial Intelligence and the Next Frontier of Publishing Rights
As the music industry looks beyond 2025, the conversation among publishers, creators, and collecting societies is increasingly dominated by a singular, transformative force: Artificial Intelligence (AI).
The Coming AI Licensing Wave
Generative AI companies are aggressively training large language models (LLMs) and audio generation models using vast corpuses of copyrighted material, including musical compositions and lyric databases. As the music industry establishes legal frameworks and licensing agreements with AI developers, the monetization of songs will undergo another structural evolution.
Industry insiders note that the commercial architecture for AI licensing is likely to mirror the evolution of digital streaming:
- Hybrid Pathways: Some AI companies will seek blanket licenses negotiated centrally through collecting societies, meaning those revenues will eventually be captured in future editions of the CISAC Global Collections Report.
- Direct B2B Deals: Major music publishers and independent rights-holders are already striking proprietary, direct-to-consumer or enterprise-level licensing deals with tech platforms developing AI models. These direct arrangements will bypass collective societies entirely.
Consequently, future editions of global publishing reports will likely face the exact same reporting paradox seen today: surging revenues driven by new technological frontiers, accompanied by a growing split between society-collected funds and publisher-direct income.
Navigating Complexity in an Expanding Market
For songwriters and composers, the overarching message of the 2025 Global Collections Report is one of robust financial health tempered by systemic complexity. Digital platforms continue to expand their reach, live music and public performance have roared back to reclaim their historic position ahead of terrestrial broadcasting, and mature collecting infrastructures are adapting to modern realities.
However, as the market expands—incorporating new data streams like The MLC, navigating direct publisher deals, and bracing for the AI licensing wave—transparency and data literacy will become paramount. Understanding the distinction between what flows through a collecting society and what is secured via direct negotiation will remain an essential skill for creators and executives alike as they chart the future of the global music publishing economy.
