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.
