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The Mechanical Licensing Collective plans to start paying out unmatched and unclaimed US streaming mechanicals by market share in 2027, beginning with January 2021 usage. Money that nobody has claimed by then goes to whoever already earns the most. Here is how to register, match and claim before it does.
Industryvia The Mechanical Licensing Collective
Apple Music weights plays of tracks available in Spatial Audio at 1.1 against 1 for everything else, whether or not anyone listens in spatial. The catch is that you can't fake the mix, and the maths only works for tracks with a lot of Apple plays.
Industryvia Apple Music for Artists
Tencent Music says more than 10 million people use its AI music production platform, and its tools can publish a generated song to QQ Music in one click. On its Q4 call it said songs made wholly by AI get a different royalty-sharing model, while AI-assisted songs sung by humans stay on the traditional one. We haven't seen a big Western streaming service draw that line in public.
AIvia Tencent Music Entertainment Group
Spotify says Brazilian artists generated about R$2bn on the service in 2025 and Mexican artists about MX$8.2bn. Both numbers are real growth, but they measure money paid to rights holders, not to artists, and Mexico's headline "more than half from abroad" is close to Spotify's own global average.
Industryvia Spotify Newsroom
Indonesia's national royalty body, LMKN, has issued 2026 distribution rules that pay first on reported usage data and give a capped fallback allocation to members whose songs never show up in the logs. The same body says music in TikTok and YouTube live streams can owe royalties. For songwriters, getting your songs into the data now decides more of what you're paid.
Industryvia LMKN
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