If you write or publish songs in the US, Amazon Music just made Phonorecords V personal. On October 15, NMPA president and CEO David Israelite called Amazon's mechanical-rate proposal the worst among the major streaming services, labeled the terms "terrible," and said a company with a $2.8 trillion market cap and $717 billion in annual revenue wants to squeeze songwriters the hardest. Amazon is roughly 100 times the size of the entire US publishing and songwriting industry, and it still asked the Copyright Royalty Board to cut the headline rate songwriters get paid.
What Amazon asked for
Phonorecords V will set the mechanical rates on-demand services pay songwriters and publishers from 2028 through 2032. Spotify, Apple, Google, and Pandora largely want the Phonorecords IV deal kept in place, including the 15.35% headline rate that arrives in 2027. Amazon went the other way. Backed formally by Qobuz, Beatport, and classical streaming app IDAGIO, it proposes a 13.4% headline rate of eligible service revenue for non-bundle offerings across the whole five-year period. That is a step backward from 15.35%, and Israelite notes it is less than songwriters were paid a decade ago.
Bundling is where the filing gets sharper. For music-plus-audiobook style bundles, Amazon wants the Copyright Royalty Board to discard the percent-of-revenue framework entirely. The all-in royalty for bundled subscription offerings would sit at 21.3% of total content cost, down from 24.5%, with a floor of 29 cents per active subscriber instead of 33 cents. Performance royalties would still come out first. Amazon also wants public-domain plays and fake-play accounts out of the math, late fees dialed back, and app-store commissions kept out of the royalty base.
Why Israelite called it terrible
In a short video, Israelite framed Amazon as the "worst offender" among the services. He said Amazon wants rates cut across every category, radical changes to how revenue is defined, relief from late-fee penalties the law already requires, and a continuation of forced bundling modeled after Spotify's music-plus-audiobook approach. On that last point he said that bundling scheme has already cost songwriters and publishers more than $1 billion. Amazon's own filing argues that publisher pushback after it rolled out a similar Audible bundle "robbed Amazon of a key benefit it expected to gain from the Phonorecords IV settlement."
Testimony supporting Amazon's proposal even includes a Royalty Compliance Organization co-founder urging publishers to charge songwriters less and do more to properly distribute the royalties they already collect. That is not the tone publishers were hoping to hear going into a five-year rate case.
What this means if you release independently
Headline rates and bundle floors are not abstract CRB trivia. They shape the songwriter side of every stream on the services that matter, whether you focus on recordings or on publishing. Keep registration clean, protect your splits, and treat distribution as infrastructure. DistroKid remains a straightforward way to get releases onto the platforms fighting this case, and you can get 7% off your membership through this DistroKid link.
Does Amazon's 13.4% ask change how you think about mechanical rates, or were you already watching the bundling fight closest?
