Digital Music Royalties Rose 28% in 2025, CISAC Reports

Digital services paid out the largest share of music publishing royalties in 2025, according to Billboard, which reported the figures on 4 November 2026 from CISAC's Global Collections Report 2026.

Publishing royalties are the payments owed to the people who write songs, and to the publishers who hold rights to those songs on their behalf. They are collected by societies that act for songwriters and composers, and CISAC, the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers, is the global network of those societies. Its member bodies in 225 societies across 110 countries serve more than 5 million creators.

Digital income made up 45.6% of publishing royalties in 2025. That money came to 6.41 billion euros ($7.25 billion), up 28% from 5.01 billion euros ($5.42 billion) in 2024. Billboard reported that this made digital the biggest single source of publishing royalties that year.

Overall publishing collections rose 11.9% in 2025. About 6.6 percentage points of that growth came from revenue collected by the U.S. Mechanical Licensing Collective, the American body that gathers royalties for songs streamed and downloaded in the United States. The collective's money was counted for the first time this year. Organic growth, meaning growth from existing sources, accounted for about 5.3 points.

CISAC's director general, Gadi Oron, wrote that the confederation now faces its largest test yet. He pointed to artificial intelligence, new business models and changing listening habits as the pressures ahead.

That worry is not new for the group. An earlier CISAC study on generative AI, published in December 2024, said the market for AI-generated music and audiovisual content would grow sharply within five years. It also argued that copyrighted works were driving value for AI providers while creators were left out of that growth.

For a songwriter, these figures are not abstract. A royalty statement can be the difference between a month that works and one that does not, and a rise in digital income means more of that money is now coming from streams, downloads and online platforms. The same shift also means that payments depend heavily on how digital services set their terms, and on how fairly the value of new uses of music is shared.

CISAC covers five creative fields: music, audiovisual, theatre, visual arts and literature. Its members collect for all five, so the same network that pays a composer for a song also collects for a playwright or a film director.

Next year's figures will show whether digital growth holds, and whether the first full year of US collective income adds to the total in the same way. For now, the headline is clear: the money that reaches creators is increasingly coming through screens.