Chris Castle: Trends driving the Music Business in 2025

In this Hypebot exclusive, artist advocate, blogger and attorney Chris Castle joins our select group of industry leaders sharing their perspective on trends driving the music business in 2025.

Trends driving the Music Business in 2025

by Chris Castle of Music Technology Policy and Music Tech Solutions

1. Songwriter Future View: CRB and Phonorecords V

In the US, we are fast approaching the beginning of another mechanical royalty rate proceeding under the compulsory license styled “Phonorecords 5” or “Phonorecords V” that covers the years 2028-2032. PR 5 will set the rate for both physical downloads paid by record companies through publishers or administrators and streaming mechanicals paid by streaming platforms through the Mechanical Licensing Collective.

That proceeding will launch around January 2026, but there are likely going to be “voluntary negotiations” starting in 2025 and probably soon. I know it may seem like we just went through one of these proceedings, but in the spirit of full employment of lawyers and lobbyists, that sound you heard was the meter going down.

“labels and publishers would have been better served by including the songwriters and independent publishers in the negotiation”

Recall that the upshot of the last proceeding (Phonorecords 4) on the physical/download piece was that the labels and publishers would have been better served by including the songwriters and independent publishers in the negotiation phase rather than waiting until public comments were opened by the CRB. This failure resulted in the CRB rejecting the frozen rates that the labels and big publishers agreed, accepting new and higher rates agreed to by the labels along with a cost of living adjustment.

This left the streaming services where they are now with a very complicated and very crappy rate for streaming mechanicals along with no cost of living adjustment in highly inflationary times.

So the question for Phonorecords 5 is have the publishers learned that if they fail to include input from a broad group of songwriters and independent publishers at the earliest possible stage of the “voluntary negotiations” they are just postponing the inevitable. Plus they will have no basis for claiming they represent all publishers and all songwriters when they clearly do not. No one should be clearer about that failure of representation than the CRB after the frozen mechanicals debacle.

Likewise, the streaming services are going to have to answer for a lot of shenanigans at many different levels not to mention their failure to offer a cost of living adjustment for songwriters at the same time that Daniel Ek is cashing out. They can all come around or songwriters might cry havoc.

2. It’s the Stock, Stupid

And speaking of stock, I am hopeful that songwriters and labels are going to stop buying the crying poor from streaming services. No one should believe that these services get into business because they want to “make a profit.” They get into business for the stock, especially in an IPO. The idea that services are hard done by with their 30% share of a restrictively defined revenue pool that does not include increase in market valuation is laughable. The “we can’t make a profit” canard being sung at the same time their executives are cashing out bigly is a not too funny joke.

“shite and garbage in produces garbage out”

It’s almost as unfunny as the services old reliable canard that they pay billions “to the industry” and that artists who complain of streaming royalties need to blame their labels or publishers. Not that there isn’t a complaint there, but its none of the services’ business. We know from the same shite royalties paid to unsigned artists who don’t share with a label that shite is shite and garbage in produces garbage out. It’s just insulting.

The first step toward fixing streaming royalties is to eliminate the revenue share and establish a fixed per stream rate. Our royalty should not be dependent on how efficiently the services run their business or how many people buy into the poor mouthing from some of the richest corporations in commercial history.