Music Is Borderless. Its Royalties Aren't.

Someone in Berlin plays a song on Spotify. An American songwriter wrote it, and it reached the listener the way every stream does: one file, from one catalog, over the same internet as everywhere else. No border was involved.

The songwriter’s money is a different story. Spotify pays the songwriting royalty “based on the territory of usage,” so a play in Germany makes German money, collected in Germany. The recording’s royalty doesn’t work that way; it goes to whoever delivered the track, wherever the play happened. The listening is borderless, and so is the recording’s money. The song’s money has to cross a border to reach the person who wrote it.

This post follows that one play all the way to the songwriter.

Stop One: Germany

Songwriting royalties are collected by collecting societies, organizations that license music in their country and collect for songwriters. There are 228 of them in 111 countries and territories. Each covers its own territory, and they’re tied together by agreements to collect for one another. This goes back to copyright itself: under the Berne Convention, the main international copyright treaty, protection in each country is governed by that country’s law.

Say the song is licensed the usual way, through the network of societies. Then the play in Berlin is collected by GEMA, Germany’s society. GEMA’s running costs came to 14.1 percent of what it collected in 2025. The model agreement between societies also lets them set aside up to 10 percent of performance income for social and cultural programs for their own members. GEMA takes 10 percent on public performance and 1 percent on its online categories, and that money stays in Germany.

Then the songwriter’s share waits. BMI says most foreign societies pay it once or twice a year. EU law gives a society up to nine months after its financial year ends to pay a society abroad, and gives the receiving society another six months to pay its writers.

Stop Two: Home

Eventually the money reaches the songwriter’s own society, BMI in the US, which takes its own fee of 3.6 percent on international income and pays the songwriter. BMI tells its writers this “can take 12-18 months depending on the country of origin.” And if a foreign society gets the amount wrong, most won’t correct errors under $50. For a songwriter, that’s a lot of plays.

So one play, delivered in a fraction of a second, gets paid through two countries’ institutions on two calendars, more than a year later. That’s the normal case. Spotify says that two years after their debut, artists earn on average more than half of their Spotify royalties from outside their home country.

Nobody has measured what the whole chain costs a songwriter, and we won’t pretend to. But WIPO, the UN agency for intellectual property, has a worked example in its guide for new collecting societies. Suppose foreign and local music each make up half of what’s played. After 30 percent operating costs, a 10 percent cultural deduction, and money from foreign songs nobody could identify being shared out among everyone else, “only 23,5 % of the total revenue goes abroad.” It’s WIPO’s hypothetical, not a measurement, and WIPO meant it to reassure new societies that their money wouldn’t all flow out of the country. From the foreign songwriter’s side, it reads differently.

A River Full of Castles

The medieval Rhine had the same problem. In 1250 there were about 12 toll stations between Mainz and Cologne. Once there was no emperor to authorize new ones, the number at least doubled within four years, by economic historians’ estimates. Each castle set its own price, and nobody had to agree with anybody for the total to end up higher than one owner of the whole river would have charged.

The Rhine was eventually fixed by a rule. The Mannheim Act of 1868 said that navigation itself carries no toll, while charges for actual services were still allowed. That’s roughly what we’d want for songwriters’ money: pay for work someone actually does, not for the money crossing a line on a map.

The Biggest Publishers Already Left

The best evidence that the borders are optional is that the biggest publishers stepped outside them.

In 2005 the European Commission recommended that online music be licensed across borders, and that rights holders be free to move their online rights. The major publishers moved first. They pulled the online rights to their Anglo-American catalogs out of the usual society network and moved them into new Europe-wide licensing companies, each run with one or two of the biggest societies. In 2010 the majors held 68.7 percent of music publishing. And their money moved faster: in the Commission’s own figures, GEMA paid online income every six months, while CELAS, the company licensing EMI’s catalog, paid every month.

Everyone else stayed inside. Europe’s fix for them kept the societies and added a layer on top: licensing hubs that cover many countries at once. When the Commission checked in 2021, the fees charged to rights holders “have not decreased,” and services’ overall costs “appear to have increased.”

None of this needs anyone to act in bad faith. Each layer gets paid because there’s a border where it stands. The biggest catalogs were big enough to go around. The songwriter with the play in Berlin isn’t.

Where Borders Still Make Sense

Some things don’t change with a better payment system. Copyright law is national, and a payment system can’t rewrite a treaty. The US withholds 30 percent tax on royalties paid to foreigners unless a treaty lowers it, and that’s a tax, not a fee.

One region doesn’t mean one price, either. Spotify Premium costs CHF 15.95 (about $19.40) a month in Switzerland and ₹139 (about $1.46) in India, and we think pricing for what people can afford is right. Prices and royalty pools per country can stay. What we’d change is the chain of institutions the songwriter’s money passes through afterward.

And some music really is local. A bar or a gym plays music in one place and has to be licensed there, so collecting locally makes sense, even if the counting is crude: PRS in the UK pays out more than half its public-performance money by “analogy,” using stand-in data such as radio logs instead of what was actually played. That’s a different post.

One Region: Earth

Cloudflare, the internet infrastructure company, describes its developer platform with a phrase we like: “one region: Earth.” Developers don’t pick where their code runs; it runs everywhere. Cloudflare never pretended borders went away, though. Customers who are legally required to keep data in one country can turn that on in software. Global by default, local where the law requires it. That’s the model we want for songwriters’ money.

Miso works that way. Who owns the song and the recording, and how each track’s money is split, is written down before anyone pays, and it can’t be edited later. A fan pays the release directly, and a payment from Berlin goes to the same place as a payment from São Paulo. From there the money moves in steps that anyone can kick off, but it can only go where the splits say, and each owner collects their share from wherever they live, when they choose. Nobody in Germany has to work out whose song it was, because that was settled before any money arrived.

Miso doesn’t license music to streaming services or change copyright law or tax, and one payment doesn’t pay everyone at once. It’s live on Sui Mainnet, the main public network of the Sui blockchain, with Miso’s record sales running on it. Miso Streaming is in development, and early prototypes show the design works.

Within those limits, we think the songwriter gets more, because fewer institutions take their costs one after another, and gets it sooner, because there’s no calendar between societies to wait on. The play in Berlin reached its listener over the internet in a fraction of a second. The money for it should travel the same way.