The most important line in CISAC’s latest global royalty report sits in a note to editors at the bottom of the press release: the headline growth rate “is not a like-for-like comparison.” The International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers says royalties collected for creators worldwide rose 11.3% to a record €15.5 billion in 2025. About 52% of that increase, it adds, came from one organisation reporting its figures for the first time.
That organisation is The Mechanical Licensing Collective, the US body that collects mechanical royalties from streaming and download services. Strip it out and global music collections grew 5.3%. For songwriters, publishers and the independent artists who write their own material, the gap between those two numbers is the real story of the 2026 Global Collections Report, published on 4 November.
What the Record CISAC Number Actually Measures
CISAC is the umbrella body for collective management organisations, the societies that license and collect royalties for the people who write songs, scores, films, books and artworks. In 2025 its membership comprised 228 societies in 111 countries and territories, according to CISAC’s announcement. The report counts what those societies collected for creators, which makes it a measure of the songwriting and publishing side of the business rather than of recorded music sales.
Music dominates the total. Collections for music creators rose 11.9% to €14.06 billion, or about $15.87 billion, according to Music Business Worldwide’s analysis, up from a restated €12.56 billion in 2024 and 83.5% higher than in 2016. The other repertoires are small by comparison: audiovisual €0.76 billion, visual arts €0.21 billion, literature €0.23 billion and drama €0.23 billion.
How One New Member Changed the Headline
The MLC is a new CISAC member, and this is the first report to include its numbers. As Music Ally put it, there is a caveat to the growth: 2025 was the first year CISAC’s figures included collections reported by The MLC. The effect on the United States is dramatic. US digital music collections rose 71.3% to €2.39 billion; without The MLC they were €1.55 billion, up 11.4%. That €835 million difference accounts for more than half of the €1.50 billion increase in global music collections, MBW calculated.
The same adjustment shrinks the US headline as a whole. American music collections rose 29.7% to €4.07 billion, keeping the US as the world’s largest market, but excluding The MLC the rise was 3.1%. Canada and the US together led all regions with 26.6% growth, yet by MBW’s calculation that falls to around 2.8% without The MLC, which would have left Central and Eastern Europe as the fastest-growing region, as it was in 2024.
None of this means the money is not real. Mechanical royalties from US streaming are paid to songwriters, and counting them gives a more complete picture of what creators earn. It does mean that the 11.3% growth rate describes a wider measurement, not a market that suddenly accelerated. The like-for-like figure, 5.3% for music, is the one that shows underlying momentum.
Digital Is Now the Biggest Source of Songwriter Income
Digital, which covers licensing of streaming and download services from Spotify to Netflix, rose 27.9% to €6.57 billion across all repertoires, or 42.4% of the global total, and it is the leading source of income for creators. In music alone, digital collections reached €6.41 billion, 45.6% of the music total. Excluding The MLC, digital music grew 11.2%.
After the US, the largest digital music markets were France at €731 million, the UK at €678 million, Japan at €434 million and Germany at €327 million. New licensing deals with the telecoms groups Orange and Bouygues Telecom lifted France, while the UK benefited from growth in paid streaming subscriptions and broadcaster video-on-demand services such as BBC iPlayer, MBW reported.
China shows how long these deals can take. Digital collections there rose 61.4% to €30 million after the local society MCSC renewed agreements with Tencent Music and NetEase Cloud Music, following four years of negotiation. The figure is small for a market of that size, which is itself a reminder of how much licensing remains unfinished.
Live and Background Music Overtook Broadcast
The quieter change in the report may matter more for working musicians. Live and background collections, which come from concerts and festivals and from music played in shops, restaurants, hotels and gyms, rose 7.7% to €3.87 billion across all repertoires and overtook TV and radio for the first time to become creators’ second-largest source of income.
In music, the category grew 7.3% to €3.62 billion. Live performance collections rose 14.9% to €1.4 billion, the third straight year above €1 billion, and background music rose 5.6% to €1.2 billion. France led the growth, with live performance revenue up 44.9%, followed by the UK and Germany.
Broadcast went the other way. Music collections from TV and radio fell 3.0% to €3.32 billion, the lowest total since 2021, mainly because of declines in the largest markets; in France, broadcast collections fell 4.4%. Some small markets rose sharply for one-off reasons: India’s TV and radio collections jumped 184.1% after a late licence payment, and Malaysia’s rose 367.5% to a record €4.7 million after three years of outstanding broadcaster payments arrived.
What Independent Songwriters Should Take From It
Three practical points follow for independent writers. First, the money is increasingly in streaming and live use, not broadcast, so registration of works and setlists with the relevant society is where collected income starts. Second, US streaming mechanicals are large enough to move a global report, which is why writers who release music in the US need their songs registered with the body that collects them. Third, the headline numbers are averages across 228 societies; growth in your own statements depends on which territories and uses your songs actually reach.
The report also shows how uneven the map remains. Europe is still the largest collecting region, with €8.09 billion across all repertoires and 52.2% of the global total. Asia-Pacific passed €2 billion for the first time, Latin America and the Caribbean collected €847 million and Africa €92.4 million. For a writer whose audience is spread across those regions, the society network that CISAC represents is the plumbing that turns plays into payments.
The AI Question Hanging Over the Next Report
CISAC used its centenary report to put artificial intelligence at the centre of its message. Director General Gadi Oron said in the announcement that “as we enter the age of AI, past growth cannot be taken for granted”, adding that the priority “must be to ensure that technology strengthens, rather than erodes, creators’ livelihoods”.
In his foreword, CISAC President and ABBA co-founder Björn Ulvaeus argued that “human creativity is not the enemy of artificial intelligence. It is the reason artificial intelligence exists,” MBW reported. The report followed the adoption of the Paris Commitment on AI at CISAC’s General Assembly in June, which calls on governments, technology companies and cultural industries to keep human creativity recognised, protected and fairly paid. MBW noted that the foreword did not repeat the specific demand Ulvaeus made in a speech in Geneva in July, that creators be paid for what went into AI systems through a share of AI subscription revenues.
That is the issue to watch in the 2027 report. Streaming platforms are already building AI features on top of licensed catalogues; pophits.co recently looked at how Spotify AI remixes could cost up to $5 a month and pay artists who opt in. Whether those deals add a new line to CISAC’s tables, or quietly replace existing income, will decide whether next year’s growth is real or, once again, mostly a change in what is being counted.
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