The likes of Spotify, Apple and YouTube are due to enter global licensing renegotiations with major music companies this year, while Spotify in particular has attracted stinging industry criticism for filing a legal appeal against new mechanical streaming rates in the US, which would see songwriters and publishers benefit from a 44%-plus rise in royalty payouts.
Those US streaming rates were set by the market’s Copyright Royalty Board, which last year decided that, between 2018 and 2022, Spotify and other interactive streaming platforms should pay songwriters in accordance with the highest outcome across one of three different criteria: (i) a percentage of a streaming company’s total revenue; (ii) a percentage of what that streaming service pays to record labels each year; and (iii) a flat fee per subscriber in the US.