Can Streaming Services License Music Globally? (2026 Updated Breakdown)

When a song streams on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, Tidal, or any other digital service, two separate sets of rights are triggered, and both must be properly licensed and paid. This is true in every country where the stream happens, and the licensing infrastructure that makes it work is far more developed than most listeners realize. In the United States specifically, the central framework that resolves the global licensing problem at scale has been operational since January 1, 2021, when the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) began administering blanket mechanical licenses for all eligible streaming and download services under the Music Modernization Act of 2018.

The question of whether streaming services can license music globally has a clear answer: yes, they do it every day at a massive scale through a combination of statutory frameworks, performance rights organizations (PROs), reciprocal international agreements, and direct deals with major labels and publishers. The more useful question is how it actually works, what each layer of the licensing system does, where the structural gaps still exist, and what the major 2024-2026 developments (AI training lawsuits, royalty threshold changes, artist-centric payment models) mean for the future of global music licensing. This guide walks through the actual mechanics with the specific institutions, statutory frameworks, and recent industry developments that shape how a song you hear today gets cleared and paid for.

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1. Why Music Licensing Matters — and What’s Actually Being Licensed

A song is a more complex legal object than most listeners realize. When a track plays on Spotify or Apple Music, the platform is using two separate categories of intellectual property simultaneously, and each is owned by potentially different parties with separate licensing requirements.

The composition rights (sometimes called the publishing side or the underlying musical work) belong to the songwriters, composers, and lyricists who created the song itself, the melody, the chord progression, and the lyrics. These rights are typically administered by music publishers on behalf of the writers. When a stream happens, the composition rights holders are owed two types of royalties: mechanical royalties (paid for the reproduction of the composition) and performance royalties (paid for the public performance of the composition).

The master rights (sometimes called the sound recording rights) belong to whoever owns the specific recorded performance of the song. For mainstream commercial releases, this is typically the record label; for independent artists, it’s the artist themselves or their distributor. The master rights holders are owed sound recording royalties on every stream.

A streaming service cannot legally play a song without clearing both sets of rights, and in many cases, the composition rights for a single song are split across multiple writers, multiple publishers, and multiple national territories. Before the Music Modernization Act established the MLC, the composition side was particularly problematic many songwriters faced significant issues collecting their mechanical royalties from digital streaming services because the per-work licensing model didn’t scale to the millions of songs streaming on modern platforms.

This is the actual licensing problem streaming services face. It’s not “can they license music globally” they have, for years. It’s the engineering and administrative challenge of resolving billions of monthly streams down to specific rights holders across hundreds of jurisdictions with imperfect data and getting accurate payment to each correct party. The fact that you can build a playlist from a global catalog with one tap is the visible result of an enormous backend infrastructure most listeners never see.

2. The US Solution — The Music Modernization Act and the MLC

The most important development in US digital music licensing since the 1990s is the Music Modernization Act (MMA), signed into law in October 2018 and operationalized on January 1, 2021. Before the MMA, the per-song mechanical licensing system created by Section 115 of the Copyright Act in 1909 was failing badly under streaming scale songwriters routinely lost royalties because services couldn’t identify the correct rights holders for every song in their catalog. The MMA created three coordinated solutions.

Title I — The Musical Works Modernization Act: replaced the per-song mechanical licensing system with a blanket license covering all musical works for digital music providers offering permanent downloads, limited downloads, or interactive streams. The Copyright Office designated the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) as the nonprofit entity to administer this blanket license, and designated the Digital Licensee Coordinator (DLC) to represent the licensees (the DSPs).

Title II — The Classics Protection and Access Act: created federal rights for owners of sound recordings made before February 15, 1972. Pre-1972 recordings had been a legal gray zone because federal copyright protection for sound recordings only began in 1972 — Title II resolved this by extending federal-style remedies to those older recordings.

Title III — The Allocation for Music Producers Act (AMP Act): codified a process for SoundExchange (the designated collective for digital sound recording performance royalties) to distribute royalties to producers, mixers, and sound engineers via a “letter of direction” mechanism. Before the AMP Act, these non-featured creative contributors had no statutory path to collect on digital performance royalties.

How the MLC actually operates: each month, DSPs that operate under the blanket license send usage data and royalties to the MLC for all the music streamed and downloaded on their services; the MLC matches the DSP-reported streams and downloads to the songs registered by Members and calculates the royalties owed; the MLC distributes royalties to Members on a monthly basis. The MLC’s members are self-administered songwriters, composers, and lyricists; music publishers and administrators; and collective management organizations (CMOs).

The historical royalties process: following the Copyright Royalty Board’s finalization of Phono 3 rates in August 2023, DSPs had until February 9, 2024 to deliver revised usage and adjusted payments for previously reported Phono 3 usages. The MLC began distributing matched Phono 3 historical royalties in its April 2024 distribution, and has been distributing matched historical royalties and adjusted blanket royalties throughout 2024 and 2025. The “black box” of unmatched royalties (mechanicals that the MLC can’t link to a specific rights holder) remains a real but shrinking problem.

What the MMA does NOT cover: the master recording rights side. Sound recording royalties are still negotiated directly between DSPs and rights holders (typically the major labels Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group plus independents). The MMA also does not cover non-interactive streaming (like internet radio), which goes through SoundExchange separately. And the MMA only resolves the US territory; the international licensing problem requires a different set of solutions.

3. International Licensing — How PROs and Reciprocal Agreements Work

Outside the United States, the licensing infrastructure is built around national performance rights organizations (PROs), also known as collective management organizations (CMOs). Each major country has at least one, and many have multiple. The system as a whole operates through a network of reciprocal representation agreements that allow each national PRO to license and collect on behalf of writers from every other connected territory.

The major performance rights organizations by territory:

United States ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, and GMR (Global Music Rights). United Kingdom PRS for Music. Canada SOCAN. France SACEM. Germany GEMA. Japan JASRAC. Australia and New Zealand APRA AMCOS. India IPRS (Indian Performing Rights Society). Spain SGAE. Italy SIAE. Brazil ABRAMUS and other federated bodies. Mexico SACM. Israel ACUM. Most other countries have at least one designated PRO.

How reciprocal agreements work: a reciprocity agreement between two national PROs grants each the right to license and collect performance royalties for the other’s repertoire in its home territory. The ASCAP and PRS for Music reciprocal agreement, for example, has been in place since 1919 meaning that for over a century, US venues, radio stations, TV networks, and digital services have paid ASCAP for the public performance of PRS-affiliated songs, while UK venues and services have paid PRS for ASCAP-affiliated songs. The two PROs then exchange the collected royalties so each writer ultimately gets paid through their home society.

CISAC — the international umbrella body: the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC) is the global umbrella organization that manages standards for cross-border collection. CISAC standardizes the works identifiers and information exchange between PROs through its management of the ISO international standard numbers specifically the International Standard Works Code (ISWC) for musical compositions. Without ISWC and the CISAC infrastructure, the reciprocal agreement network couldn’t actually function at scale there would be no shared way to identify which song was streaming where.

MusicMark — the North American collaboration: MusicMark is a collaboration between ASCAP, BMI, and SOCAN aimed at simplifying the music registration process and creating a common, authoritative picture of the musical works represented by the three societies. For songwriters releasing music in North America, this means a single coordinated registration across the three largest English-language PROs.

A concrete 2025 example — PRS and IPRS partnership for Apple Fitness+ in India: in 2025, PRS for Music and the Indian Performing Rights Society announced a new licensing model to support the launch of Apple Fitness+ in India. Under the new arrangement, IPRS acts as the home territory society responsible for licensing within India, while PRS for Music’s cloud infrastructure handles the rights administration. This is exactly the kind of cross-border digital licensing arrangement that makes a single global streaming service legally workable across very different national legal regimes.

4. Strategies Streaming Services Actually Use to License Music Globally

Streaming services don’t license music globally through a single mechanism; they use a layered combination of approaches, each suited to different rights, territories, and rights-holder types.

Direct deals with the major labels for sound recordings: for master recording rights, the major DSPs (Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube) negotiate direct license agreements with Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group. These deals are typically global or cover large multi-territory regions, and they’re renegotiated every few years with significant business implications each time. Independent labels and distributors handle their own catalogs through distribution agreements with platforms like DistroKid, TuneCore, CD Baby, Stem, Symphonic, and others.

Statutory blanket licenses in the US: for the composition mechanical side in the US, DSPs operate under the MLC blanket license. This single license covers every musical composition registered (or matchable) in the MLC system, a vastly more efficient mechanism than the pre-2021 per-song licensing approach.

National PRO deals for international performance rights: in each non-US country, DSPs sign licensing agreements with the relevant national PRO (or PROs) to cover composition performance rights. These deals are typically negotiated nationally and feed into the broader CISAC reciprocal network for international writer payment.

Direct publisher deals for major catalogs: for some of the largest music publishing catalogs (Sony Music Publishing, Universal Music Publishing Group, Warner Chappell Music, Concord Music Publishing, BMG Rights Management), DSPs sometimes negotiate direct licensing arrangements that bypass the PRO collection layer in certain territories. These direct deals are typically combined with the PRO-based collection for the long tail of the catalog.

Distribution-aggregator deals: for the hundreds of thousands of independent artists releasing music globally, distribution aggregators (DistroKid, TuneCore, CD Baby, Stem, Symphonic, AWAL, and others) function as the licensing intermediary. They handle the deal with each DSP and the royalty collection back to the artist.

Geo-blocked release windows: when rights can’t be cleared in a specific territory, DSPs simply geo-block the release in that market. This is why some albums are available in the US but not in Japan, or vice versa the territorial license for that specific rights bundle wasn’t available at the time of release.

Technology as the connective tissue: all of the above only works because of the underlying technical infrastructure, ISWC and ISRC identifiers (the latter for sound recordings), automated stream-matching systems, real-time usage reporting from DSPs to PROs and the MLC, and increasingly sophisticated rights-management databases. The complexity isn’t in the legal frameworks anymore, those are reasonably well-established. The complexity is in the data reconciliation across millions of works and billions of monthly streams.

5. The 2024-2026 Transformation — How Recent Developments Reshaped Global Licensing

The two-year period from 2024 through 2026 has produced more material changes to global music licensing than any comparable stretch in the streaming era. The five most significant developments:

1. The RIAA lawsuits against AI music generators (June 2024). The Recording Industry Association of America, on behalf of the major labels, sued Suno and Udio in June 2024, alleging unauthorized use of copyrighted sound recordings to train AI music generation models. The lawsuits seek up to $150,000 per infringed work, which in the aggregate could reach tens of billions of dollars. These suits are the first major test of whether AI training on copyrighted music constitutes fair use or requires affirmative licensing the outcome will fundamentally reshape how AI-generated music can be created, distributed, and licensed.

2. Spotify’s 1,000-stream royalty threshold (April 2024). Spotify implemented a policy excluding tracks with fewer than 1,000 annual streams from per-stream royalty payments; these earnings instead get redistributed to higher-streaming tracks. This single policy change shifted hundreds of millions of dollars annually away from the long tail of small independent artists toward the major-label-dominated middle of the catalog a material change in how streaming royalties flow globally.

3. Deezer’s Artist-Centric Payment System with Universal Music Group (launched October 2023). Deezer launched its Artist-Centric Payment System (ACPS) with UMG in October 2023, a fundamental restructuring of how streaming royalties are calculated. ACPS boosts payments to professional artists meeting minimum thresholds, demotes royalties for non-music audio (white noise, sound effects), and reduces algorithmic-radio-style passive streaming weighting. This is the first major label-platform partnership to materially change the pro-rata royalty model that has dominated streaming since 2008.

4. ASCAP, BMI, and SOCAN AI registration policies (October 2025). The three largest English-language PROs adopted common policies in October 2025 under which musical compositions partially generated using AI tools can now be registered directly with each society. This is the first major institutional acknowledgment that AI-assisted composition is now a meaningful percentage of submitted works and that the registration infrastructure needs explicit policies for how to handle them.

5. Two-tier royalty thresholds are globalizing. Per the IMS Business Report 2025, the two-tier royalty model (where tracks with fewer than a threshold number of streams are not paid royalties, with that income instead shared with bigger labels) is expected to expand throughout 2025 and beyond. This trend is reshaping the financial reality for self-releasing artists globally. More artists are now earning less, even as the total streaming pie grows.

What didn’t happen: blockchain did not revolutionize music royalty tracking. The blockchain-based royalty management projects that received significant industry attention from 2017 through 2021 (including ASCAP’s experimental blockchain partnership with PRS for Music and SACEM) have largely been deprioritized in favor of more conventional database modernization. The transparency and accuracy improvements the industry needed have come primarily from better data exchange standards (ISWC matching, MusicMark, CISAC’s CIS-Net) rather than from distributed-ledger technology. The blockchain narrative was a 2018-2020 talking point that has not delivered on its predictions.

6. The Hurdles That Remain Despite the Frameworks

The global licensing infrastructure works, but it doesn’t work perfectly. The major remaining structural problems:

The black box of unmatched royalties. Despite the MLC’s matching infrastructure, a portion of streaming royalties cannot be reliably linked to a specific rights holder, typically because the song wasn’t properly registered, the rights holder data is incomplete, or there are competing claims that can’t be resolved without further documentation. The MLC has been actively shrinking this black box throughout 2024-2025, but it has not eliminated it. The same problem exists internationally with foreign PROs, often on a larger scale than in the US.

Slow international payment cycles. The reciprocal agreement system between PROs works, but it’s slow. A US writer whose song is streamed heavily in Japan might wait 12-24 months after the streams happen before the corresponding royalties from JASRAC actually arrive at ASCAP and get distributed to the writer. Modern streaming creates real-time data; the international royalty pipeline is still largely quarterly or annual in cycle.

Sync and digital video royalties under-collected. Sync placements (music used in TV, film, advertising, video games) and royalties from short-form video (TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts) are among the most under-collected categories globally. The data infrastructure to track and match these uses is significantly less mature than the data infrastructure for streaming audio.

Different copyright durations across countries. The copyright term varies internationally. The US uses life of the author plus 70 years for most works; many European countries use the same standard; some other jurisdictions are shorter. This means a song can be in public domain in one country but still under copyright in another, creating complex licensing situations for global streaming services.

Language barriers in the work registration. Songs released in languages with limited PRO infrastructure (some African, Southeast Asian, and Central Asian markets, for example) often have weaker registration data than English-language works, leading to weaker royalty collection even when the songs are streaming heavily.

The AI training licensing question remains open. As of 2026, there is no settled legal framework for whether AI training on copyrighted music requires affirmative licensing. The RIAA lawsuits against Suno and Udio will produce some clarity over the coming years, but the technology is moving faster than the legal infrastructure.

7. What Global Music Licensing Means for Working DJs and Event Producers

For working DJs, event producers, and entertainment buyers, the global licensing infrastructure has direct practical implications that are often misunderstood. The most important: a personal Spotify or Apple Music subscription does not include any kind of public performance license. Those subscriptions cover personal use only; playing music at a corporate event, wedding, concert, or any commercial gathering requires separate licensing.

For venues: venues that host live music or play recorded music for guests typically pay annual blanket licenses to ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, and GMR. These licenses give the venue the right to perform any work in the catalog of those PROs. A hotel ballroom hosting a corporate event already has this coverage in most cases. An event venue without these licenses faces real legal exposure.

For DJs: working DJs typically operate under the venue’s license rather than carrying their own. Working DJs must also source their music from properly licensed channels, DJ-specific subscription services (DJcity, BPM Supreme, Beatport DJ, iTunes Match for legacy use) include the licensing necessary for professional DJ use. A DJ using personal Spotify or Apple Music to perform commercially is technically violating those services’ terms of use, regardless of whether the venue is covered.

For corporate event planners: the practical implication is that you want to hire a DJ who understands and operates within the licensing framework, sources music through professional channels, and works at venues that have appropriate PRO licensing in place. A professional corporate event DJ operates within this infrastructure as a matter of course it’s part of what separates a working professional from a hobbyist with a Spotify account.

8. The Realistic Future of Global Music Licensing

The likely trajectory for global music licensing through 2027-2030 is more incremental than revolutionary. The structural frameworks are largely in place; the work ahead is making them work better, faster, and more accurately.

Better data reconciliation rather than new frameworks. The MLC, CISAC’s CIS-Net, MusicMark, and the major PROs’ internal databases are all converging toward better real-time data exchange. The result will be faster, more accurate royalty matching, fewer black box royalties, shorter international payment cycles, and better identification of small rights holders.

AI training licensing frameworks will emerge. The RIAA lawsuits, combined with active congressional discussion about AI training compensation, will produce some form of statutory or industry-negotiated framework for AI training licensing within the next 3-5 years. Whether it’s a US Section 115-style blanket license model, individual opt-in licensing, or some new structure remains to be determined.

Artist-centric payment models will spread. Deezer’s ACPS model with UMG is likely to be followed by similar arrangements at other platforms. The pro-rata model that has dominated streaming since 2008 is increasingly under pressure from both label and artist sides, expecting substantial modifications across multiple DSPs through the rest of the decade.

Two-tier royalty thresholds will globalize. Spotify’s 1,000-stream threshold has set a precedent that other DSPs are likely to follow. The result will be continued financial pressure on long-tail self-releasing artists and a continued consolidation of streaming income toward higher-volume creators and the major labels.

Short-form video royalty collection will mature. TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts royalty collection has been catching up to streaming-audio data infrastructure throughout 2024-2026. Expect this to continue, short-form video royalties are likely to become a more reliable income stream for working musicians by 2028.

Regional music markets will continue gaining global share. Per the IMS Business Report 2025, Afro house, Amapiano, drum & bass, K-pop, Latin pop, and other regional genres continue gaining international audience and revenue. Global licensing infrastructure has improved enough that regional artists can now reach global audiences with reasonable royalty collection, a meaningful change from 10 years ago.

The Bottom Line — Can Streaming Services License Music Globally?

Yes and they have been doing it at massive scale for years through a layered infrastructure that combines statutory frameworks (the Music Modernization Act and the MLC in the US, similar national frameworks elsewhere), international PRO reciprocal agreements (some, like ASCAP/PRS, dating back over a century to 1919), CISAC umbrella standards, direct deals with major labels and publishers, and increasingly sophisticated data exchange infrastructure.

The global music licensing system is imperfect, black box royalties exist, international payment cycles are slow, sync and short-form video royalties are under-collected, and the AI training licensing question remains genuinely unresolved. But the framework is functional at a scale that would have been unimaginable 20 years ago, and the major 2024-2026 developments (RIAA AI lawsuits, Spotify thresholds, Deezer ACPS, PRO AI policies) represent active modernization rather than systemic failure.

For listeners, the practical result is that a global music catalog is available with one app download in most countries. For artists and songwriters, the result is that royalty collection is more comprehensive than it has ever been, though still incomplete and still slow. For working musicians, DJs, and event producers, the result is that operating within the licensing framework is both more important and more straightforward than it has ever been. The era when “global music licensing” was a future-tense aspiration is over. It exists now, it works imperfectly, and it continues to improve.

About the Author

William “DJ Will Gill” Gilbert is a corporate event DJ, emcee, and working music professional whose 600+ corporate events include work for AT&T Business, CDW, Team USA, Virgin Galactic, NeoGenomics, Foot Locker, Home Depot, BGCA, and Fortune 500 organizations. He operates within the professional licensing framework that this article describes, sourcing music through licensed DJ-specific channels and working with venues whose PRO licensing is current. Will is recognized as the Wall Street Journal’s #1 Corporate DJ, a Forbes Next 1000 honoree, and has 2,520+ five-star reviews. Broadcast credits include Super Bowl LIV and The Voice 2011.

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