Amazon wants to pay songwriters less per stream. Here is what the filings say.

Every five years, three judges at the US Copyright Royalty Board decide what streaming services must pay songwriters and publishers for the mechanical right in a song. The current round is called Phonorecords V (docket 25-CRB-0013-PR), and it sets the rates for 2028 through 2032. The opening proposals were filed on October 5, 2026, and the redacted public versions went up two days later.

Four of the five big services asked the judges to keep things roughly as they are. Amazon asked for a cut.

Where the rate is today

Under the last deal (Phonorecords IV), the headline rate is a percentage of a service's US revenue, and it has been stepping up each year: 15.3% in 2026, reaching 15.35% in 2027. A service pays the greater of that headline rate and a second test built on what it pays record labels (the "total content cost", or TCC), with a per-subscriber floor underneath. Bundles, such as music sold together with audiobooks, get their own lower numbers.

What each service asked for

Spotify, Apple, Google (YouTube) and Pandora each proposed keeping the 15.35% headline rate for the whole 2028 to 2032 period. Google and Pandora added smaller changes, such as leaving app store commissions out of revenue, but none of them asked to lower the headline number.

Amazon proposed going backwards on almost every number for services that are not bundles, including its standalone subscriptions and free, ad supported tiers:

• Headline rate: 13.4% of revenue, down from 15.35%.
• TCC rate: 22.8%, down from 26.2%.
• Per-subscriber figure for standalone portable plans: 96 cents, down from $1.10.
• Mechanical minimum: 52 cents, down from 60 cents.
• Bundles: drop the percent-of-revenue test entirely and pay 21.3% of TCC (down from 24.5%), with a floor of 29 cents per active subscriber (down from 33 cents).

Why Amazon says it should pay less

Amazon's argument is about bundles. It says the lower bundle rates were part of what it bargained for in the Phonorecords IV settlement, and that publishers fighting how services use those rates "robbed Amazon of a key benefit it expected to gain" from that deal, leaving "uncertainty and acrimony". It also says it "should not have to pay royalties on revenue that it never receives", and wants app store commissions and revenue from fake accounts left out.

Amazon's economist, Leslie Marx of Duke, adjusted the old benchmark for what she called "intervening evidence of market power" on the publishing side. Her numbers come out about 13% below Phonorecords IV, which is roughly the size of the cut Amazon asked for. Qobuz, IDAGIO and Beatport backed Amazon's filing.

What songwriters and publishers asked for

The National Music Publishers' Association (NMPA) and the Nashville Songwriters Association International (NSAI) filed together and went the other way. They want services to pay the greatest of four numbers:

• 20% of service revenue.
• 40% of what the service pays record labels.
• $2.40 per subscriber per month (20% of a $12 plan), adjusted for inflation.
• $0.004 per play on every kind of service, free tiers included, also adjusted for inflation.

They also asked to end the family plan discount (a family plan is counted as 1.75 subscribers today) and the student discount (half a subscriber), to stop zero-rated free trials, to tighten what counts as a bundle, and to require services to report per-play listening data to songwriters. NMPA chief David Israelite put the goal plainly: songwriters "should have a minimum of at least 40% of what record labels and artists get paid." Of Amazon he said: "They want to go backwards from 15.35% of their revenue pool to only 13.4%."

The bundle fight underneath all of this

In March 2024 Spotify moved its main US plans into the bundle category by adding audiobook hours, which lowered what it pays in mechanicals. The Mechanical Licensing Collective sued, and that case is still open. The publishers' Phonorecords V filing says Spotify has already kept "more than $500 million in mechanical royalties that should have been paid to songwriters and publishers." Israelite puts the cost of bundling as a whole at more than $1 billion. Spotify's own SEC filing says that if the MLC won outright, its exposure from March 2024 to June 2026 would be about EUR 473 million plus penalties and interest.

You may have seen the $500 million figure described as what bundling has cost creators "since 2024" across Amazon and Spotify. As reported from the filing, it is the publishers' claim about Spotify alone.

What happens next

These are opening positions, not outcomes. Under the judges' revised schedule, amended filings are due by December 21, 2026, responses by February 1, 2027, and there is a settlement window from January 25 to February 15, 2027. If nobody settles, the hearing runs March 22 to April 15, 2027, and the initial decision is due by December 17, 2027. The physical and download rate (13.1 cents per track in 2026, rising with inflation) is already the subject of a separate settlement that would carry it through 2032.

What it means if you write songs

Take the headline number alone. If a service is paying on its revenue test, moving from 15.35% to 13.4% shrinks that songwriter pool by about an eighth (1.95 points out of 15.35). On a pool that already pays fractions of a cent per stream, before the publisher and the PRO take their shares, that is real money for a working writer.

You do not get a vote in Phonorecords V. What you do control is how much of your income depends on it. A song you sell directly to fans is not priced by a rate court: you set the price, and the money goes to your own account. That does not replace streaming, but it is the part of the business where nobody can file a proposal to pay you less.

A note on what we checked: the Copyright Royalty Board's document site blocks automated reading, so the numbers above come from Music Business Worldwide's and Digital Music News's reporting on the filings rather than from the filings themselves. We left out per-stream figures we could not tie to a filing. This is news, not legal advice.