Why Royalties Are Booming, Claims Are Surging, and Royalty-Free Is Winning

Why rights are booming, claims are surging, and “royalty-free” is winning.

Across the music industry, the money flowing through copyright and licensing is reaching record levels. Global recorded-music trade revenues reached $29.6B in 2024, the latest full-year global figure available. Collecting societies reported €13.97B in global royalty collections in 2024, with digital passing €5B for the first time. Meanwhile, global streaming volume continues to expand, reaching 5.1 trillion streams in 2025.

Why Royalties Are Hitting Records
Music isn’t just monetized when people press play anymore. It’s monetized when people use it. 

Ten years ago, music money mostly meant streams, downloads, radio, and a few big sync deals. Today, music lives inside digital workflows where it’s used constantly: a TikTok with a hook, a YouTube intro, a podcast bed, a Shopify ad, a fitness app video, a game stream, an Instagram Reel, a template in an editing app. Each of those uses is a licensable event.

Paid streaming also raised the floor through recurring subscription revenue: Spotify Premium, Apple Music, and YouTube Music, etcetera. Subscriptions run every month, which makes rights income more always-on instead of seasonal or hit-dependent.

And because more of this usage happens on digital platforms, it’s easier to measure and enforce at scale. That’s what CISAC—the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (the global umbrella for royalty-collecting societies)—is really saying with its digital milestone of passing €5B in annual digital collections for the first time.

It’s a sign that digital has become the primary rail for royalty capture. Until recently, TV & radio (broadcast) was the biggest royalty stream; digital only took the number 1 spot in 2022, then widened the lead year by year.

Why Claims Are Exploding
When royalties move onto digital rails, more usage becomes measurable. When usage becomes measurable, it becomes monetizable. And when it becomes monetizable, it becomes worth policing. That’s why attribution tightens as the royalty pool grows.

In the old world, disputes were the exception. In the digital world, disputes are part of the infrastructure. Every upload forces a payout decision: who gets paid for this use? If the ownership picture is incomplete—multiple writers, changing splits, samples, territory differences, conflicting identifiers—the system can’t wait for humans to sort it out. It defaults to automation. And automation produces claims.

The causal chain is straightforward: bigger royalty pools increase leakage risk, leakage risk drives stricter attribution, stricter attribution pushes more automated enforcement, and automated enforcement increases claims.

The creator economy accelerates all of this. Traditional licensing was built for a handful of high-value placements with long lead times: creators ship at volume, with constant uploads, endless variations, cross-posted formats, localized edits, and always-on ads. High volume doesn’t just create more usage but more edge cases. And edge cases get resolved by automatic systems, not people, which means more claims.

Additionally, in an age of AI-generated music, provenance becomes harder to prove, so copyright becomes more important as a permission layer. Expect rightsholders to enforce attribution more aggressively—with more takedowns, more claims, and less tolerance for unclear licensing.

Bigger royalty pools → higher leakage risk → stricter attribution → more automated enforcement → more claims

Why “Royalty-Free” Is Winning
Once claims become routine, creator behavior changes in a predictable direction. If ambiguity leads to muted audio, demonetization, blocked ads, or delayed launches, then the rational move is to reduce ambiguity. That’s the real demand signal behind royalty-free music. 

Royalty-free doesn’t mean copyright-free. The music is still copyrighted. The difference is that permission is packaged in advance. Instead of a platform deciding after upload whether your use is covered, royalty-free moves the decision before you publish. You’re not hoping the system interprets ownership correctly. You’re operating with a license that’s designed for the exact environments creators live in: social, ads, client work, and multi-platform distribution.

This is why royalty-free music so cleanly fits into modern workflows. The creator economy doesn’t produce one “final cut.” It produces variations. A 30-second ad becomes six versions. A YouTube video becomes Shorts. A paid campaign becomes a dozen creatives. With mainstream music, every variant increases the surface area for claims and interruptions. With royalty-free, you’re buying repeatable permission, a rights posture that scales with volume.
Once claims become a normal part of publishing, creator behavior changes in a predictable way. If ambiguity triggers interruptions—muted audio, demonetization, blocked ads—teams start optimizing for certainty. That’s why “royalty-free” is winning. It doesn’t remove copyright. It removes uncertainty. It moves permission from after upload to before upload, so the rights question is answered upfront instead of being decided by automated enforcement after the fact.

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