ICMP, the global music publishing organization representing 90% of the world’s commercially released music, has released its first-ever report on global music revenue, documenting the earnings of 16 of the top music markets.
In total, ICMP found that these select markets — United States, the United Kingdom, France, Japan, Germany, Australia, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Canada, South Korea, the Netherlands, Brazil, Mexico, Hong Kong and South Africa — were worth more than $11 billion alone. Because some markets have slightly different accounting periods, the revenue in the report stems from the markets’ last 12 months of completed financial data. Largely, that data is from 2023.
The report helps publishers and songwriters make sense of what trends are building in this sector of the music business and how music lovers across markets are consuming music differently.
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Overall, digital revenue makes up 47.1% of the $11 billion plus in total revenue earned by the 16 markets, while 20.2% of revenue came from synchronization (songs placed in films, TV shows, commercials and video games); 21.5% stemmed from non-digital performance (songs played in restaurants, stores and other public venues); 5.9% came from non-digital mechanicals (songs sold as digital downloads, CDs, vinyl records, cassettes and more); and 4.6% was described as “other.”
In total, 40.9% of overall global publishing revenue was collected directly by publishers, and 59.1% was collected by performing rights organizations (PROs) and other collective management organizations (CMOs), which act as middlemen between licensees and publishers.
Below is a breakdown of Billboard’s top takeaways from the report.
Digital Revenue Dominance Varies Widely Across Markets
Latin music lovers are some of the world’s biggest digital music consumers, according to the report. Mexico’s music publishing sector earns a whopping 70.5% of its revenue from digital sources like streaming services. This makes sense, considering the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) reported in April that streaming equates to 98% of total revenue for Latin music in the U.S. on the master recording side.
When it comes to the three East Asian markets considered in ICMP’s report, their digital music consumption was strong but varied fairly significantly, proving music listeners in those markets are far from a monolith. Hong Kong’s revenue was 60% digital, whereas Japan came in at 49.7% digital and South Korea was 47.5% digital.
While Hong Kong is an outlier among East Asian countries, this does not mean that it correlated more closely with its former colonizer, the United Kingdom. In the U.K., digital represented just 41.5% of all publishing revenue.
In the European Union, digital consumption was generally much lower. Italy had just 20.3% of revenue come in from digital sources, while the number was 23.8% in France, 34.6% in the Netherlands, and 35% in Spain, which came in at the high end for the continent but was still relatively low, from a global perspective.
Synch Revenue Correlates to Strong Film/TV Markets
Given their robust film/TV businesses, it should come as no surprise that the U.S. and France had the strongest shares of synchronization in their total publishing revenue pie. The U.S. came in with 23.5% synchronization revenue and France had 18.6%.
Brazil (18.3%), Italy (17.9%), the U.K. (17.7%), Hong Kong (17.3%) and Australia (16.2%) also have strong revenues from synchronization uses. In general, countries that speak English, apart from South Africa, tended to report strong synch revenue shares, possibly due to the ubiquity of globally-distributed originally-English-language TV and film programming.
Countries like South Africa (9.7%), Mexico (9.5%), the Netherlands (9.2%) and Germany (8.8%) had much weaker synch markets, each owing just single-digit shares of their revenue in 2024 to synchs.
The Importance of CMOs Differs Across the World
For every country included in the report, more than half of their revenue was not directly sent to music publishers but through an intermediary CMO. Still, ICMP found that this percentage differed substantially from market to market.
Japan takes in the vast majority of its publishing revenue (84%) through intermediary CMOs — as do countries like South Korea (82.8%) and Brazil (77.2%).
The U.S. music publishers collect the most direct money of all the countries included in the report, with 40.9% going directly to publishers and the remaining 59.1% going through a CMO (like ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, GMR or the MLC). This lower number passing through CMOs might account for CMO regulations unique to the U.S. market. For example, ASCAP and BMI, which collect U.S. performance monies, have not been allowed to collect royalties from movie theaters when songs are played publicly (the “cinema royalty”), even though most other countries do.
To read through the full report, visit ICMP’s website.
