Creator Royalties Hit Record €15.5 Billion, Audiovisual Passes €750 Million – CISAC Global Collections Report 2026

Industry News

by Nino LeitnerToday

Subscribe to News - Industry

CISAC’s Global Collections Report 2026 is out, and the headline is a record: creators worldwide collected €15.5 billion in royalties in 2025. For filmmakers, the more interesting number is further down in the report. Collections for screenwriters and directors passed €750 million for the first time, and their income from streaming grew by almost a third. I went through the report to see what it means for people who make films and series, and how much of it is really about AI.

CISAC, the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers, is the umbrella organization for 228 authors’ societies in 111 countries and territories. These societies are collective management organizations: they license the use of creative works and pay the royalties to the authors. One example that many of our readers in Europe know is SACD, which represents screenwriters and directors in France. The 2026 report, which CISAC published on November 4 in its 100th year, covers the 2025 collections for music, audiovisual, visual arts, literature and drama.

The 11.3% headline growth needs a footnote, and CISAC gives it in the report. For the first time, the total includes The Mechanical Licensing Collective (The MLC), the US organization that collects mechanical royalties for songwriters from streaming and download services. The MLC accounts for approximately 52% of the annual increase. Without it, global collections grew by 5.3%, after 6.4% in 2024. That is still growth, but it is a slower pace than the record number suggests.

TV and radio drop to third place

Digital collections rose by 27.9% to €6.57 billion, which is 42.4% of all royalties collected worldwide. In 2016, digital was only €1 billion. Live & Background, the category for concerts and festivals plus music played in shops, restaurants, hotels and gyms, grew to €3.87 billion. With that, it overtook TV & Radio, which fell by 2.6% to €3.82 billion. As recently as 2021, TV & Radio was the largest income source for creators.

The report gives context from Nielsen: in May 2026, streaming accounted for 48.6% of all TV viewing in the US, and YouTube alone for a record 13.8%. We wrote earlier this year that YouTube is now the world’s largest media company. Anyone who has looked at broadcast commissioning budgets lately knows the direction. Still, it is something different to see linear TV in third place in a global royalties table.

Audiovisual collections pass €750 million

Collections for the audiovisual repertoire, which means the authors of films and series, rose by 8.0% to €762 million. This is the fourth increase in a row, and the total is 42.3% above its 2016 level. Europe still dominates with 86.2% of the global total. France alone collected €273 million, more than a third of the world total.

Here too, part of the growth comes from new members. The Writers Guild of Japan and the Korea Television and Radio Writers Association reported to CISAC for the first time and added €64 million. My own calculation from the report’s figures: without those two new members, audiovisual collections would have been about 1% lower than in 2024, not 8% higher. CISAC does not give a like-for-like number for audiovisual, so please read this as my estimate. It does show that, in the established markets, collections for screenwriters and directors did not grow in 2025.

TV & Radio is still by far the largest source for audiovisual authors, with €462 million, or 60.7% of the total (up 0.5%). In France, TV & Radio collections fell by 9.7%. According to the report, this was because 2024 had unusually high payments and because a joint licensing agreement with TV distribution platforms was in renegotiation.

What streaming pays screenwriters and directors

Audiovisual collections from digital use grew for the seventh year in a row, by 32.0% to €142 million. The largest single increase came from Japan, with €30.2 million of new revenue. France accounted for 44.9% of digital audiovisual collections, as SACD continued to sign and renegotiate contracts with distributors. These include retroactive deals for HBO Max for the period 2024 to 2027, and for Paramount+ from 2022. In Uruguay, the society AGADU received its first payment from Netflix, which is also the first time that collections were made for screenwriters and directors in that country.

Not every negotiation ends in an agreement. SACD started legal action against TikTok in November 2025. According to the society, negotiations had not produced acceptable terms, and TikTok had not removed works at SACD’s request.

To put €142 million in context: Futuresource estimates that consumers spent around $142 billion on subscription video services in 2025. This is not a like-for-like comparison, because the societies collect only certain rights, in certain countries. But in my opinion, the gap between those two numbers explains why authors’ societies are so focused on streaming deals right now. (I hope the streamers’ licensing departments read page 41 of this report.)

Cinema recovers, but not to 2016

Cinema collections across all repertoires rose by 5.3% in 2025, to their highest level since 2019. They are still 10.2% below 2016, though. CISAC quotes Gower Street Analytics, which puts the global box office for 2025 at $33.6 billion, up 12%, with another increase forecast for 2026.

Futuresource notes in the report that original productions, familiar IP and theatrical releases remain the strongest draws for streamers. It names Netflix and Apple TV+ among the services that give selected films a cinema run before they go to streaming. With the Paramount and Warner Bros. merger promising 30 theatrical releases per year, it will be interesting to see whether cinema collections return to the 2016 level in the next report.

Music in films and series

For composers who write for film and TV, one detail in the report is relevant. In June 2026, CISAC launched AVR+, a machine-readable format for cue sheets based on the Global Cue Sheet Standard 2.0. Cue sheets list the music used in a film or TV program, and when that data is incomplete, societies cannot always identify the works and pay the royalties. AVR+ is meant to automate this and link the music use data more directly to payments. It also identifies the sound recordings, so performers and labels can benefit too.

The report uses Netflix’s KPop Demon Hunters as its example: the soundtrack song “Golden” generated 2.43 billion on-demand audio streams worldwide in 2025.

The subscription boom slows down

The section from Futuresource Consulting is, in my opinion, the most useful part of the report for anyone in production. Futuresource expects global spending on subscription video-on-demand to grow from around $142 billion in 2025 to $189 billion in 2030, and paid subscriptions from 2.2 billion to 2.6 billion. But annual growth falls from 14% in 2025 to low single digits by the end of the decade. In North America, 85% of households already subscribe to at least one service.

Platforms now earn more from each subscriber instead of finding new ones: video revenue per user in the 21 markets that Futuresource tracks was 16% higher in 2025 than in 2022. Between 2025 and 2026, at least one global streaming service raised the price of its ad-supported tier in 17 markets. Dave Watkins, Principal Analyst at Futuresource, puts it like this: “The next phase of growth will be won not by acquiring new audiences, but by deepening the value of the ones platforms already have.”

The report also says that bundles with telecom companies and pay-TV operators usually give up some revenue per user for scale and lower churn. When royalties depend on platform revenue, that is not good news for authors. That is my reading, not a claim from the report, but I am almost certain that the next licensing negotiations will be about exactly these bundles.

AI is in every foreword

All three forewords are about AI. CISAC President and ABBA co-founder Björn Ulvaeus writes: “Human creativity is not the enemy of artificial intelligence. It is the reason artificial intelligence exists.” Director General Gadi Oron adds in the press release: “But as we enter the age of AI, past growth cannot be taken for granted. Our priority must be to ensure that technology strengthens, rather than erodes, creators’ livelihoods.” In June, CISAC’s General Assembly in Paris adopted the Paris Commitment, which asks governments, technology companies and cultural industries to keep human creativity recognized, protected and fairly paid.

The report has one hard number on AI content, and it comes from music. Deezer reported that fully AI-generated tracks were 34% of the new tracks delivered to its service each day in November 2025, and more than half on peak days in June 2026. CISAC points out that these are upload numbers, not listening or royalty figures. According to Oron, the first licenses between authors’ societies and AI developers have started to appear.

What the report does not have is any figure for AI licensing income, and Futuresource writes that the scale and direction of AI’s impact on collections “remain difficult to assess.” For filmmakers, the debate is already concrete, from the backlash against Seedance 2.0 to A24’s deal with Google DeepMind and the copyright case against OpenAI. My guess is that next year’s report will have to put a number on it.

Where to get the report

The full CISAC Global Collections Report 2026 is free to download from the CISAC website in English, French and Spanish. The figures are based on the 2025 gross domestic collections of 228 CISAC members in 111 countries.

Do you receive royalties through an authors’ society for your films or series, and has streaming income made a difference for you? And should AI developers pay for training on audiovisual works through the same societies? Let me know what you think in the comments below!