Streaming Giants Allegedly Coordinated to Freeze Irving Azoff's GMR Out of Mechanical Rate-Setting

If you write songs for a living, the room where your future pay rate gets decided just got a little smaller. And you probably didn't hear about it.

Every few years, the Copyright Royalty Board runs a proceeding that sets the mechanical royalty rate you earn from streams for a five-year block. This one, Phonorecords V, covers 2028 through 2032. It kicked off in January. Who sits at the table decides how hard your side gets pushed. So when a group of the biggest streaming platforms on earth moves to remove one of the sharpest negotiators in the business before talks heat up, that is your problem, not just his.

Here is what surfaced. According to Digital Music News, a recently filed Phonorecords V motion shows Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Pandora (owned by SiriusXM), and YouTube Music owner Google moving together to extricate Irving Azoff's Global Music Rights from the rate-setting process. The outlet says it reviewed the filing directly.

Five competitors, aligned on one procedural goal, in a rate fight where they sit on the same side of the table against songwriters. That is the part worth slowing down on.

The stated reason, and the one underneath it

The platforms' argument is clean on paper. GMR is a performing rights organization. It licenses public performance rights, not mechanicals. The filing quoted by Digital Music News says GMR "lacks the 'significant interest' required to participate in this proceeding," which sets rates for mechanical rights under Section 115 of the Copyright Act.

Technically true. But mechanicals and performance rights are stitched together in on-demand streaming, where a single play triggers both. Move the mechanical number and you move the performance math when both rights are present. That makes GMR's interest real, not academic. Which is exactly why the tidy jurisdictional argument reads less like housekeeping and more like a way to clear a difficult opponent off the field.

Dealmakers speaking to Digital Music News said the point was to remove Azoff himself. One source called him "very powerful and very good at negotiating increases in royalty rates." When your opponent is that good, his absence is worth engineering.

There is a wrinkle. Azoff is still part of the rate-setting group through the Music Artists Coalition. And one insider asked the uncomfortable question of whether Azoff is actually fighting this or letting it slide. If GMR agreed to "withdraw," as the reporting suggests, the collusion story gets muddier. Free money is free money, and sometimes a quiet exit is a negotiated one. We don't know yet which this is.

Why the stakes are this high right now

This is not a normal rate cycle. The bundling fight has already cost your side real money.

At its June annual meeting, the NMPA reported that U.S. publishers and songwriters missed out on nearly $500 million in mechanical royalties after Spotify and Amazon folded their paid subscribers into bundled plans, as Billboard noted. Billboard then ran its own numbers against Spotify's reports to the Mechanical Licensing Collective and found the blended mechanical per-stream rate from Spotify's subscriber tiers fell about 51%, from roughly $0.00068 in Q4 2023 to about $0.00033 two years later.

Total mechanical dollars from Spotify dropped about 45% over the same window, from around $97.3 million to $53.3 million, per Billboard. And that happened while streams grew by nearly 19.3 billion. More listening, less pay. That is the bundling loophole working exactly as designed.

Spotify itself flagged the exposure. In its 6-K for the period ending March 31, 2026, the company acknowledged a potential 410 million euro (about $471 million) liability tied to bundling if the Mechanical Licensing Collective's amended lawsuit succeeds, Billboard reported.

So Phonorecords V is the venue where the bundling question gets fought at scale for 2028 through 2032. That is the table GMR is being pushed away from.

The antitrust flashpoint

Coordinated conduct among competitors is the kind of thing regulators are built to notice. Five rival platforms moving in concert to shape who participates in a federal rate proceeding is a fact pattern that hands antitrust watchers a fresh hook, whatever the legal merits of the GMR jurisdiction argument turn out to be.

It also fits a pattern the industry keeps circling back to: consolidated buyers, consolidated leverage, and songwriters at the end of a math problem they didn't write. Spotify has already run the bundling playbook. Now the question is whether the same platforms can quietly decide who gets to argue against the next one.

There is one hopeful note. As Manatt's Jordan Bromley told Billboard, songwriters, publishers, and DSPs are negotiating new rates right now, and "now is the time to set the record straight." True. But you set the record straight with your toughest people in the room, not on the sidewalk outside it.

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Sources

• Digital Music News
• Billboard