How Much Have Spotify Bundles Decreased the Mechanical Per-Stream Rate? (Analysis)
Categoria: Musica
Following the NMPA's claim that publishers and songwriters have lost nearly $500 million in royalties due to bundling, Billboard crunched the numbers.
Por Billboard | 09/07/2026
In June, National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) executives reported at the organization’s annual meeting that U.S. music publishers and their songwriters have missed out on nearly $500 million in mechanical royalty payments since Spotify and Amazon rolled all of their paid music subscribers into bundled plans. In the wake of that announcement, Billboard analyzed Spotify’s reports to the Mechanical Licensing Collective for the fourth quarters of 2023 and 2025 and found that the blended per-stream mechanical rate from its subscriber tiers decreased by about 51%, while overall dollar payments for that license declined about 45%. While publishers tend to look at total publishing payments for their repertoire, songwriters and artists tend to look at per-stream rates as well. With that in mind, Billboard took into account both parameters and — specifically looking at Spotify paid subscriber tiers — found that the mechanical per-stream pay rate declined 51%, from about $0.00068 per stream in Q4 2023 to about $0.00033 per stream in Q5 2025. Meanwhile, the mechanical dollar amount paid by Spotify decreased 45%, from about $97.3 million in Q4 2023 to about $53.3 million in Q4 2025, using rounded numbers. Related NMPA Reports Spotify and Amazon Bundling Cost Nearly $500M in Lost Value Since 2024 Naoshi Fujikura of Universal Music Japan on Japan's Unique Superfan Culture & Global Ambitions: Billboard Global Power Players Interview Katsumi Kuroiwa of Avex on the Bruno Mars Publishing Deal & Taking the Company Worldwide: Billboard Global Power Players Interview The reason for the above percentage discrepancy is due to the fact that the number of subscribers and the amount of streams each subscriber generated every month increased between the two periods, resulting in the overall number of streams growing by nearly 19.3 billion streams — from nearly 143.6 billion streams by Spotify subscribers in Q4 2023 to nearly 162.9 billion in Q4 2025. All the above data is mainly based on calculations supplied by the law firm Manatt Phelps & Phillips, which compiles the Manatt Music Streaming Royalty Calculator , and was verified by Billboard , which compiled its own spreadsheets based on Spotify streaming reports to the Mechanical Licensing Collective for the cited time periods. (For this story, Billboard is specifically focusing on Spotify; while Amazon also uses bundling, which has similarly resulted in smaller mechanical payments, the losses are much smaller than the lost payments from Spotify.) According to Spotify’s own financial 6-K statement for the period ending March 31, 2026, the company acknowledged it had a potential 410 million euros ($471 million) liability for the period of March 1, 2024, when it rolled out bundling, through March 31, 2026, if an amended lawsuit by the Mechanical Licensing Collective on the issue proves successful. Moreover, the mechanical payment issue for bundled tiers is expected to be a big one in the