The Dutch recorded music business just had its strongest year in over a decade. Its songwriting royalty pipeline had one of its worst.
NVPI, the Dutch industry body, reported 2025 revenue of 367.4 million euros, up 10% on 2024. Streaming supplied 300.6 million euros of that, an 8% rise and 82% of the total.
Physical grew faster than streaming. Vinyl was up 21% to 45.0 million euros, CD up 22% to 16.8 million, and 28% of Dutch 15-to-17-year-olds recently bought one.
Dutch listeners are picking Dutch music
The local-share numbers are the part most foreign labels underestimate.
- Rapper Frenna was the most-streamed artist in the Netherlands in 2025, ending Taylor Swift’s two-year run, per Spotify’s year-end data.
- The top three artists were all Dutch: Frenna, Lil Kleine, Ronnie Flex.
- 72% of the 2.6 billion hours Dutch listeners streamed went to Dutch music.
- Roxy Dekker’s Mama I Made It was the most-streamed album of the year, and half of NVPI’s top 10 best-selling singles came from Dutch acts.
- Samuel Welten, Antoon and Dekker all broke on TikTok before radio moved.
That is a market where a Dutch-language release can out-earn an English-language one at home. It is also a market where the money on the publishing side did not follow.
Collections fell while sales rose
CMO means collective management organisation, the body that licenses and pays out performance and mechanical royalties on compositions. In the Netherlands that is Buma/Stemra.
Its 2025 annual report reads nothing like NVPI’s.
- Buma collected 254.7 million euros, down 4.5 million on 2024. Stemra collected 47.9 million euros, down 5.6 million.
- Combined distributions came to 239.8 million euros: 200.8 million from Buma, 39.0 million from Stemra.
- Combined online distributions fell to 74.3 million euros from 78.3 million in 2024.
- Buma’s income from abroad dropped to 13.3 million euros from 22.8 million. Stemra’s fell to 3.0 million from 5.3 million.
Buma/Stemra attributes the shortfall to delays from an IT transition, the complexity of withholding tax, lower broadcast royalties, incomplete post-distribution functionality, and higher drop-out rates during the year.
What “drop-out” actually costs a writer
Drop-out is CMO shorthand for reported usage that arrives without enough information to match it to a registered work. The money is collected. It cannot be attached to a name.
For an independent Dutch writer with a viral TikTok record, that is the gap between a payment this cycle and a claim two years out.
What to check before your next release
- Register the composition with Buma/Stemra separately from delivering the recording. Distribution does not register your publishing.
- Make sure the ISWC on the work and the ISRC on the recording point at each other. ISRC means International Standard Recording Code, and ISWC is its equivalent for compositions.
- File withholding tax paperwork for foreign territories in advance. Buma flagged it as a live cause of delayed payment.
- Claim your performer share at Sena, the Dutch neighbouring rights body, which represents more than 53,000 rights holders and splits income 50/50 between performers and master owners.
- Check that your splits are identical across distributor, publisher and CMO. Conflicting registrations get held, not paid.
This is a European pattern, not a Dutch one
Berenschot’s August 2025 whitepaper for the Dutch venue association VNPF, “Who gets paid when the music plays?”, benchmarked collection and distribution performance across Europe’s top 15 markets and found wide gaps in how well usage gets identified before payout.
Germany showed a similar disconnect between growth and where electronic royalties actually land, and France’s export income fell 8.6% even as its charts turned more local.
The lesson for anyone releasing into the Netherlands is that recorded revenue growth and songwriter payment are separate systems with separate failure modes. DDEX means Digital Data Exchange, the standard that carries contributor, ISRC and role data from distributor to DSP. A delivery with full contributor metadata gives the CMO something to match against later. A delivery with a title and an artist name does not.
InterSpace Distribution delivers DDEX-native with contributor and split data attached, and surfaces those splits in the artist royalty dashboard rather than in a spreadsheet at year end. In a market where 72% of listening is local and the local CMO is behind on matching, that metadata is the asset.
