The value of global music copyright has nearly doubled over the past decade, reaching an all-time high of $47.2 billion in 2024, according to a study conducted by Pivot Economics founder and former Spotify chief economist Will Page. That’s up from some $25 billion in 2014, and encompasses revenue from record labels, publishing and songwriting around the world, showcasing the value of musical works on a global basis.
Page’s analysis comes with the help of IFPI, CISAC and ICMP, as well as a MiDIA survey of over 250 publishers and direct contributions from rights holders and streamers, according to his paper. Within that $47.2 billion figure, Page breaks it out as $29 billion from labels (up 5%), $13.6 billion from songwriter collective management organizations (up 8%) and $4.6 billion from direct publisher revenues (down around 1%), with the overall figure growing 5.2% year over year. Yet overall, growth has slowed; from 2022 to 2023, for example, the value of global copyright had grown 11% year over year, compared to the 5.2% growth this year.
Within that, there are some trends Page picks out — perhaps most notably, that value is growing faster for publishers (up about 6% year over year) than for labels (up about 5% year over year). Page puts that down to the faded effects from the pandemic, during which streaming exploded, as well as the fact that while streaming volume continues to grow, streaming revenues are slowing. That’s largely due to more lucrative “rich four” markets — which he names as North America, Europe, Australia and the Asian collective of Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore — accounting for 87% of streaming revenue despite just 59% of streaming volume, while emerging markets see big volume increases yet modest jumps in revenue. That bucks conventional capitalism trends, but holds true across different regions, which he outlines in the report.
But the comparison to a decade ago raises other points that stand out, particularly “how it illuminates the causes and consequences of fair division — that is, the split between record labels and artists on one side, and songwriters, publishers, and their CMOs on the other,” Page writes. A decade ago, before streaming had truly taken over and while the industry was in the depths of its drastic downturn in sales and downloads, the publishing world was still bringing in record collections, bringing the global value of copyright between the two sides to a near 55-45 split in favor of labels and artists, close to parity. Streaming’s rise — and the resulting explosion of record label revenues — has tipped that scale back to 62-38 in favor of labels and artists a decade on.
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Another notable trend: the U.S. market has gotten more dominant as copyright value has skyrocketed globally, not less. In 2011, the year Spotify debuted in the U.S., Page notes that the U.S. accounted for 27% of the share of global record label revenues, which at that time IFPI reported as $16.5 billion. In 2024, as record label value has doubled to $29 billion, the U.S. accounts for 38% of that figure — suggesting that the U.S. is not just still the most lucrative region in the world, but is becoming more so. “Make it there,” his report notes, “and you can make it anywhere.” He also dives into the trend of “glocalization” — local-language music succeeding on a global scale, a term he himself coined several years ago — and highlights particular success in markets like Denmark, Brazil and Korea as notable examples in different ways.
Yet the road ahead is not linear, and there are reasons for concern that the value will not double in another decade. The elephant in the room is the rise of AI, which will have effects on copyright value that are difficult to predict at the moment, given the uncertain legal and technological frameworks that currently exist. But other challenges to fully understanding the true value of copyright remain in the many gaps in global reporting that still exist, as well as potential slowdowns for publishers ahead that would mimic the one being experienced by labels now.
