Slovakia’s SOZA pays 6 points per broadcast minute for a song with lyrics and 48 for an orchestral work, an eight-to-one gap for the same minute of airtime. Streaming has no such table, which is the first reason a single play count cannot describe what a catalogue earns across territories.
Four units for the same play
A chart or market report counts one thing, a collecting society counts another, and the money follows the society’s unit. Four units matter in practice:
- The audio stream. Luminate data show that Latin music is the fifth-largest genre in the United States, at roughly one in every 12 audio streams. That is a share of plays across the market, measured per stream.
- The broadcast minute. Germany’s GVL pays record labels for radio and TV plays by the broadcast minute, and only for tracks registered in label.gvl.
- The weighted point. SOZA multiplies minutes by a category weight, so the genre of the work changes the payout before any rate is applied.
- The levy share. Liberia’s 2016 IP Act funds a levy on copying devices, but the money has been paid out as welfare, not as per-song royalties. No play is counted at all.
A Luminate share tells you where listening sits in one market. It does not tell you what a given track is paid in Bratislava or Berlin, because neither society uses the stream as its unit.
The point table makes arithmetic simple and uneven
SOZA’s table makes the weighting concrete. Ten broadcast minutes of songs with lyrics earn 60 points. Ten minutes of orchestral work earn 480. The value of a point depends on the size of the pool, so the table sets relative shares, not a fixed fee. A catalogue of lyric-led pop competes for a smaller slice of each broadcast pool than its airtime suggests, while instrumental and orchestral material is weighted up.
For a label or publisher with mixed content, the category assigned to each work in the registration is therefore a financial field, not an administrative one. An instrumental score filed as a song with lyrics is paid at one-eighth of the rate it could have drawn.
Streaming feeds pools that do not stream
The two systems are not fully separate. SOZA’s device levy is 5.39 million euros, and half of it follows online earnings instead of broadcast points. A catalogue’s streaming performance therefore sets part of its share of a levy that is collected on hardware. Strong streaming income in Slovakia raises the claim on that half, while the other half still depends on the broadcast table.
Liberia shows the opposite case. Its law promises performers half of airplay royalties, yet the levy that exists has been distributed as welfare. A promise in statute and a payment per song are different things, and registration data matters only where the society actually pays per work.
Count integrity sits with the platform and the distributor
When a streaming count is disputed, the legal route is narrow. A federal judge dismissed with prejudice RBX’s lawsuit alleging Spotify allowed bot-driven fraudulent streams, ruling the claims were vague and showed no violation of California law. The ruling turned on the pleading, not on whether any bot activity occurred, but the practical point for an owner is that a general complaint about inflated counts did not survive.
Distributor data, by contrast, is what other parties go looking for. In the copyright case against Suno, Universal Music and Sony Music have a newly approved deposition subpoena for former Menlo Ventures employee C.C. Gong, while Suno and Udio pursue DistroKid’s AI-detection data. Records held by a distributor become evidence when a count or an origin is contested. An owner who keeps only a dashboard has no independent copy.
A unit audit for your catalogue
Work through each territory where the catalogue earns and write down the counting unit, the identifier it needs and the category it falls in:
- Streaming territories: reconcile the stream counts on distributor statements against the platform reports, and export both each quarter so a record exists outside the dashboard.
- Broadcast minutes (Germany): obtain the free label code, register tracks in label.gvl, and supply the International Standard Recording Code (ISRC) data GVL needs to match a play. Plays left unclaimed after three years go to other rightsholders.
- Point tables (Slovakia): check how each work is classified. Eight times the points per minute is the figure to test any instrumental or orchestral titles against.
- Levy pools: establish whether the pool pays per work or as a welfare distribution before budgeting any income from it. In Liberia the answer so far is welfare.
The decision that follows is where to spend registration effort. Put it first where the unit pays by work and the category carries a multiplier, and treat levy income as unbudgeted until a society shows a per-work statement. A genre share like Latin music’s one in 12 streams describes the market, but the unit in each territory’s rulebook decides what a catalogue collects from it.
