CISAC royalty collections for music creators reached a record €14.06 billion in 2025, up 11.9% on the year. But for publishers, labels and investors, the real story sits under the headline: once you remove the newly added US Mechanical Licensing Collective, growth was much slower.
The MLC effect: a change in accounting, not a surge in demand
The 2026 Global Collections Report from the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers covers 228 societies in 111 countries and territories. For the first time it includes The MLC, which collects US mechanical royalties from streaming and download services. The MLC joined CISAC in 2025.
Its roughly €835 million in collections makes up more than half of the €1.50 billion rise in music royalties. Without The MLC, global music collections grew 5.3%. US numbers show the same thing even more clearly: US digital collections jumped 71.3% to €2.39 billion, but US growth excluding The MLC was just 3.1%. Anyone modelling catalogue valuations should treat 2025 as a new baseline year, not a sign that growth is speeding up.
Where the money is moving
Digital rose 27.9% to €6.41 billion and now makes up 45.6% of music collections. Without The MLC, digital grew 11.2%. That is still the strongest underlying growth of any income stream. In emerging markets the share is far higher: digital accounts for more than 70% of collections in the Philippines, Mexico and India, and 88.6% in Indonesia.
Live and background music rose 7.3% to €3.62 billion and passed TV and radio for the first time to become the second-largest source of music income. Live music alone climbed almost 15% to a record €1.4 billion. That matters to promoters and to any rightsholder with exposure to touring.
TV and radio fell 3% to €3.32 billion. CISAC says the drop came mainly from the biggest broadcast markets, including France, where broadcast collections fell 4.4%. Linear media’s structural decline is now showing up in songwriters’ income.
AI moves from footnote to risk factor
CISAC put AI at the centre of the report, which comes out in the organisation’s centenary year. Director General Gadi Oron warned that past growth cannot be taken for granted as AI arrives. CISAC President Björn Ulvaeus, co-founder of ABBA, argued that human creativity is what makes AI possible. The report follows the Paris Commitment on AI, adopted at CISAC’s General Assembly in June. It calls on governments, tech firms and cultural industries to make sure human creators are recognised and fairly paid.
For the industry, the message is that streaming is the engine of growth, live is overtaking broadcast, and how AI licensing is handled will decide whether the record run continues.
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