BRUSSELS — A coalition of 14 European music collecting societies, representing about 1.2 million songwriters and composers, formally asked the European Commission on Monday to set a minimum payment per stream for musical works, the most direct challenge yet to the pricing model that has governed music streaming for two decades.
The proposal, submitted as part of the commission’s review of the 2019 copyright directive, would require streaming services operating in the European Union to pay at least 0.3 euro cents, or about $0.0033, to songwriters and publishers for each stream of a song, roughly double the current average. It would also require the services to publish per-stream rates by country.
“The price of a stream has gone down every year for five years while the price of a subscription has gone up,” said Henrik Lindqvist, chief executive of a Swedish collecting society and the coalition’s spokesman. “That is not a market. That is a transfer from the people who write the songs to the people who deliver them.”
The streaming services, which were not formally part of Monday’s submission, have argued in previous consultations that per-stream minimums misunderstand how the business works. Under the prevailing model, subscription revenue is pooled and divided among rights holders according to their share of total streams, so the amount paid per stream falls as total listening grows, regardless of what listeners pay. A floor, the services have said, would force them either to raise prices, cut the share paid to recording labels, or limit the catalog.
A trade group representing the major services said in a statement on Monday that it would “study the proposal carefully” and that “any change to royalty structures should be based on evidence, not on an arbitrary number.” It noted that streaming now accounts for about 70 percent of recorded-music revenue in Europe and that payments to rights holders had risen in absolute terms every year since 2015.
The dispute turns on the gap between absolute and per-work figures. According to data compiled by the coalition, total payments from streaming to European songwriters rose 9 percent in 2025, but the number of streams rose 18 percent, and the median annual streaming income of a registered songwriter in France, Germany, and Sweden was below 600 euros. “More money is going to fewer and fewer people,” said Dr. Béatrice Lemoine, an economist at the Sorbonne who studies music markets. “A per-stream floor would not fix that distribution problem. It might make it worse, because it would raise the cost of the long tail. But it would at least stop the price from falling further.”
The commission is expected to publish its review of the directive in the first half of 2027. Officials have indicated that they are more inclined to require transparency about rates than to set them, but the coalition’s submission has the backing of the European Parliament’s culture committee, which voted in favor of a minimum in a nonbinding resolution in June.
Mr. Lindqvist said the societies were prepared for a long fight. “We are not asking anyone to pay more for music,” he said. “We are asking that the people who make it be paid for making it. If that sounds radical, that tells you something about where we are.”
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 12, 2026, Section A, Page 11 of the European edition with the headline: European Songwriters Push for a Minimum Payment Per Stream, and Platforms Push Back.
