Elton John's Lyricist Wants Every Stream Worth Exactly 0.3 Cents. The Labels Disagree.

If you write and release your own tracks, you already know the uncomfortable truth: your stream count and your payout barely talk to each other. In the US, the reason is structural, and it's about to be argued over for the next year inside a federal board most producers have never heard of.

What is Phonorecords V actually deciding?

The Copyright Royalty Board, a three-judge panel housed inside the Library of Congress, runs a rate-setting proceeding every few years to fix mechanical royalties, the money owed to whoever wrote a composition, separate from whatever the master recording earns. Phonorecords V will set those rates for 2028 through 2032. Written testimony from every party closed October 5, 2026. The case now moves into discovery, with the main hearing opening March 22, 2027 and an initial determination expected by December 17, 2027, a full year before the new rates even take effect.

This isn't an abstract legal exercise for anyone in house and electronic music who self-releases. If you're the credited songwriter on your own Beatport or Bandcamp upload and it streams on Spotify or Apple Music, you collect a mechanical royalty as the writer, on top of whatever the master earns. What this board decides literally sets the price of that royalty for the next four years.

Why doesn't a producer already know what a stream is worth?

Because streaming mechanical royalties in the US aren't a fixed number per play, they never have been. Physical records and downloads get a flat statutory rate: 13.1 cents per track in 2026, up from 12.7 cents in 2025, climbing each year with cost-of-living adjustments locked in since the last cycle. Streaming gets none of that. It runs on a formula that compares a percentage of a service's revenue against a per-subscriber benchmark and pays out whichever is bigger, then splits that pool across every stream on the platform. The streaming side of the formula has stayed frozen through the entire 2023-2027 cycle while the physical rate kept climbing.

That formula is also why bundling fights happen. When a service packages music with something else, audiobooks being the most cited example, the revenue counted as "music revenue" for the formula can shrink even if subscriber numbers don't, which quietly shrinks the pool every songwriter is splitting. A producer watching their own stream count climb has no way to audit any of this. There is no per-stream number to check their statement against, because none exists.

Who's actually fighting for what?

Bernie Taupin's camp, alongside the Songwriters Guild of America, the Society of Composers & Lyricists, Music Creators North America, Eight Mile Style and Word Collections, wants to replace the formula entirely with a flat $0.0030 per interactive stream, adjusted for inflation every year like the physical rate already is. Their pitch, in Taupin's own framing, centers on inflation protection: a number that can't be quietly eroded by how a platform structures its bundles, and one a songwriter can actually use to forecast income.

On the other side, DIMA, the trade group representing the streaming platforms, is pushing back hard, arguing the current system isn't broken: it points to US music publishing revenue climbing from $5.6 billion to $7.3 billion since 2022, over 30 percent growth, as proof the formula is already delivering. Major labels and the NMPA are filing their own competing positions rather than backing the coalition's flat number. None of this is settled; it's exactly what discovery and the March 2027 hearing exist to fight out.

Why does this matter more with the catalog flooding right now?

Because the current formula splits a finite revenue pool across every stream on a platform, and that pool gets diluted by volume, not just by bundling. The more tracks compete for plays, AI-generated catalog included, the thinner the slice becomes for everyone splitting the same formula-based pie, including a human producer who wrote and released their own record. A flat per-stream rate doesn't solve catalog flooding, but it does insulate what a songwriter-producer actually collects from being diluted by how much unrelated volume shows up on the same platform. That's the quiet reason a four-year-old rate case about cents matters more this cycle than it has before.

Why it matters

If the flat rate wins, every self-releasing producer gets, for the first time, a fixed number to budget against on the composition side of a stream, independent of how a platform structures its revenue. If the labels' and platforms' side holds the line, the opacity that already makes streaming math impossible to audit for a small writer continues for another four-year cycle, through 2032.

What we think

Nobody in a DJ booth is tracking a Copyright Royalty Board docket, and that's precisely the problem: this is the federal plumbing that decides what a stream is worth to the person who wrote it, and it moves in near-total silence while everyone online argues about Spotify's headline payout-per-stream instead. A flat number producers can actually plan around would be a genuine win here, whatever figure it eventually lands on.