Spotify, Apple, Amazon, Pandora and Google have laid out what they want to pay U.S. songwriters and publishers for on-demand streams from 2028 through 2032, filing rate proposals in the Copyright Royalty Board’s Phonorecords V case. Public, redacted versions of the October 5 filings surfaced around October 7.
Four of the five services are asking the judges to keep Phonorecords IV economics in place, including the 15.35% headline rate that takes effect in 2027. Amazon is the outlier: it wants that headline cut to 13.4%, with lower Total Content Cost (TCC) and per-subscriber floors, and it wants the percentage-of-revenue prong dropped for some bundles.
On the other side, the NMPA and NSAI propose that services pay the greatest of 20% of revenue, 40% of what labels receive (TCC), $2.40 per subscriber per month, or $0.004 per play — a sharp lift from today’s structure.
Bundles remain the flashpoint
Publishers argue Spotify’s March 2024 reclassification of Premium tiers as audiobook bundles diverted more than $500 million that should have gone to writers. Spotify’s own quarterly disclosure says that if the Mechanical Licensing Collective were fully successful, liability for March 2024 through June 2026 would be about EUR 473 million, before penalties and interest and partly offset by direct publisher deals. Amazon has since launched a similar music-plus-audiobooks product.
Unless the parties settle, the CRB hearing is set for March 22–April 15, 2027, with an initial decision due by December 17, 2027.
Image: thematic still from Phonorecords V coverage (DJ Pulse); MBW hero credited Martina_L/Shutterstock and DMN lead were blocked by site protection on download.
Sources: Music Business Worldwide; Digital Music News.