Will Page
The value of global music copyright reached $45.5 billion in 2023, up 11% from the prior year, according to the latest annual industry tally by economist Will Page. When Page first calculated the value of various music copyright-related revenue streams in 2014, the figure was $25 billion—meaning music copyright could double in value in ten years.
Record labels represented the largest share of global music copyright with $28.5 billion in 2023, up 21% from 2022. Streaming grew 10.4% and accounted for the majority of labels’ revenue. Physical revenues fared even better, rising 13.4%, while vinyl record sales improved 15.4%. Globally, vinyl is poised to overtake CD sales “soon,” Page says. CD sales are still high in Japan and across Asia, but Page points out that vinyl is selling more units at increasingly higher prices. “It’ll easily be a $3 billion business by the next [summer] Olympics” in 2028, he says.
Collective management organizations that collect royalties on behalf of songwriters and publishers had revenue of $12.9 billion, up 11% from the prior year. In a sign of shifting economic influence, live performances now pay more to CMOs than general licensing for public performances. Additionally, CMOs’ digital collections exceeded revenues from broadcast and radio, reflecting the extent to which streaming has usurped the power of legacy media. A decade ago, digital made up just 5% of collections while broadcast accounted for half.
Trending on Billboard
In another shift in the industry’s power dynamics, publishers collected more revenue from direct licensing than they received from CMOs. These royalties are a combination of “large and broadly stable income like sync and grand rights and fast-growing digital income,” says Page. “Publishers prefer direct licensing as it means they see more money faster,” he explains. A song that spikes in mid-March, for example, takes 201 days to pay the artist and 383 days to pay the songwriter. “What’s more,” he adds, “a third of that [songwriter] revenue can disappear in transaction costs” in the form of administration fees charged by various CMOs.
While some parts of music copyright suffered during the pandemic—namely public performance revenue—music has surged since 2020 to overtake the brick-and-mortar movie business. In 2023, music was 38% larger than cinema. That marked a massive shift since pre-pandemic 2019, when cinema was 33% bigger than music. Over the last four years, music grew 44% while cinema shrank 21%. The true difference between music and cinema is even greater: Page’s music copyright numbers account for trade revenue that goes to rights holders and creators. The cinema figures in his head-to-head comparison represent consumer spending. Of cinema’s $33.2 billion in box office revenues in 2023, only half goes to distribution, according to one analyst’s estimate.
Page’s report covers the totality of revenue generated by both master recordings and musical works. He removes double-counting — mechanical royalties that are counted as revenue by both record labels and music publishers, for example — and fills in the gaps in more focused industry tabulations by the IFPI, CISAC and the International Federation of Music Publishers.
“Anyone trying to capture the attention of policymakers who doesn’t grasp the threat posed by AI, for example, may find it handy to have a big number showing what’s at stake,” he wrote in the report.
For large, Western music companies, the globalization of music has opened new markets to their repertoire. Page’s report looks at the reverse effect: the value of developed streaming markets to artists in less wealthy countries. North America and Europe, regions dominated by subscription revenue, accounted for 80% of the value of streaming growth but just 48% of the increase in the volume of streaming. In contrast, Latin America and Asia (less Japan), where streaming platforms get far less revenue from each listener, accounted for 12% of streaming’s value growth compared to 46% of its streaming activity gains.
To artists from Latin America and Asia, fans in markets where streaming royalties are higher can be lucrative. For example, the nearly $100 million of streaming revenues generated by Colombian artists such as J. Balvin and Shakira inside the U.S. was six times greater than those streams would have been worth in their home country. This “trade-boost” of $78 million was worth more than the entire $74 million Colombian recorded music industry. Similarly, Mexican artists’ streams inside the U.S. were worth $350 million in 2023—$200 million more than had those streams come from Mexico.
“Let’s remember, Mexico and Colombia are just two examples exporting to just one market,” says Page, who co-authored a paper in 2023 that described the rise of “globalization,” a term for music created for local markets in native languages that tops local charts on global streaming platforms. “There’s so many more across South and Central America and the whole world is listening to these new ‘glocalisatas’.”
A rebound in performing rights and heightened demand for physical product helped the value of global music copyright reach $41.5 billion in 2022, surpassing the $40 billion mark for the first time, according to a report released Monday (Nov. 6).
While record labels commanded a majority of the global market, the $5 billion annual increase was “evenly shared” between recorded music and music publishing, noted the report’s author, Will Page. The 2022 tally represented a 16% increase at constant currency — and currency fluctuations played a major role. Page restated the value of global music copyright in 2021 to $36.9 billion from $39.6 billion due to updated foreign exchange rates. Almost $2 billion of the nearly $3 billion restatement came from IFPI’s global recorded music revenues, while about $1 billion of the adjustment came from music publishing.
Record labels accounted for $26 billion of the $41.5 billion sum, a 62.7% share that was lower than both 2021 (64.6%) and 2020 (63.5%). Since 2020, a slowdown in labels’ digital revenue has been offset by more than $1 billion in growth from physical formats from “accelerating demand for CDs in Asia” and an “insatiable need” for vinyl records in Europe and the United States: “And this isn’t going to slow down,” predicts Page.
Music publishers increased their share of the global total to 37.3%. Part of the reason publishers outperformed labels could be from what Page calls a “lag effect,” where labels tend to license to new streaming platforms before publishers. Another potential reason for publishers’ improvement is early accruals from the royalty increase in the United States from the Copyright Royalty Board, “a decision that will fully crystalize when the 2023 figures are calculated,” writes Page.
Publishers’ direct revenue rose from $3.7 billion to $4.1 billion but accounted for a smaller 9.9% share of total revenue, down from 10.2% in 2021. Songwriter CMOs rebounded with a 27.5% share of total revenue worth $11.4 billion, after taking a 25.3% share worth $9.2 billion in 2021 and a 27.2% share worth $8.5 billion in 2020. Page attributes CMOs’ improvement to music’s return to the live space after the pandemic, which drives gains in public performance royalties. Also, “inflation is embedded into blanket licenses,” wrote Page, meaning higher prices increase collections when the royalties are calculated as a percentage of revenue. Finally, as CISAC’s Gadi Oron has noted, CMOs have improved collections through a combination of content identification and improved licensing terms.
There’s a chance Page’s $41.5 billion figure is low. The estimate incorporates global recording revenue tallied by the trade group IFPI. But as Page notes in his report, MIDiA Research “has arguably done more research” on segments undercounted by IFPI’s various members, including the do-it-yourself artists who account for 10% of global streams, indie labels and the South Korean market. MIDiA Research put the value of global recorded music in 2022 at $18.9 billion, about 8% greater than the IFPI’s figure of $17.5 billion.
If MIDiA’s methodology is correct, says Page, the value of global copyright is closer to $45 billion than $40 billion and could be $50 billion sooner than people expect. When the music business hits that threshold, it will have doubled since Page’s 2014 report put the global value of music copyright at $25 billion.
-
Pages