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Recorded Music Made $29.6 Billion Last Year. Here Is Where the Money Stops.
The industry's own trade body reports a tenth consecutive year of growth, driven almost entirely by streaming. The question the headline number does not answer is how much of it reaches the people who made the music.
The $31.7 Billion Music Industry Figure Is Not What Listeners Spent
IFPI's headline number counts revenue booked by record companies, not money paid by the public. Its published methodology sets out exactly which pounds, pesos and yen are inside the line and which are not.
The Treaty Behind Film Quotas and Cultural Subsidies Refuses to Rank Below Any Other Treaty — Then, in the Next Paragraph of Article 20, Says It Modifies None of Them
UNESCO's 2005 Convention declines to be subordinated to any other treaty in one paragraph and disclaims modifying any other treaty in the next. Twenty-one years after adoption, what that combination actually delivers is still argued over.
The Beijing Treaty gave film actors five exclusive rights, then let national law hand all five to the producer
The Beijing Treaty on Audiovisual Performances took twelve years to negotiate and entered into force in 2020. Article 12 is the provision that made agreement possible, and it is the one that decides who actually owns a performance.
A Treaty From 1886 Forbids Making Copyright Depend on Paperwork. The US Copyright Office Still Issued 415,780 Registrations in Fiscal 2025.
Article 5(2) of the Berne Convention says the enjoyment and the exercise of these rights shall not be subject to any formality, and WIPO Lex listed 182 contracting parties when consulted on 4 September 2026. In the United States registration does not create the copyright — it decides what a copyright owner can collect.
One Hundred Countries Belong to a 1961 Treaty on Paying Musicians for Airplay. The United States Is Not One of Them.
The Rome Convention asks its members — unless they reserve against the provision — to require a single equitable payment when a commercially released recording is broadcast. The United States never joined, and when it ratified the 1996 treaty covering the same ground it filed a formal declaration limiting the obligation to certain digital transmissions.
Thirty Per Cent of a Streaming Catalogue in Europe Must Be European. The Catalogue Is Not Where the Argument Ends.
Content quotas moved from broadcast schedules to on-demand catalogues, and the law now reaches the shelf. What it cannot reach is the viewing hour — and Europe's own audiovisual observatory has the numbers that show the difference.