What a Song Is Worth Before It Is a Song

A song begins long before anyone can stream it, usually at about two in the morning, with a cold cup of tea and one line that refuses to leave.

Last week Amazon Music asked the US Copyright Royalty Board to lower what streaming services pay songwriters for 2028 to 2032, from 15.35 per cent of revenue to 13.4. The publishers and the Nashville Songwriters Association have asked for 20. The judges will hear it next spring.

I don’t want to pick a side at that table, because I’m not sitting at it. Neither, for the most part, are the people who write the songs. What strikes me from out here is that everyone is arguing about the price of a thing without asking how it is made.

A finished song arrives on a phone in three and a half minutes. What it cost does not. It cost the chorus that didn’t work and the one that almost did, the version that was too clever, and the long walk in the middle of the afternoon when nothing seemed to happen. Then, quite suddenly, something did.

Nobody listens to a song to reach the end of it.

I have watched this here since 2013. People come up for a writing camp with a plan, and the plan is usually the first thing to go. The good songs turn up on the third or fourth day, once everyone has stopped trying to be impressive and started listening. You can’t schedule that. The harder you chase a song, the faster it runs. All you can do is make room for it: time, quiet, and nobody watching the clock.

That room is what a royalty rate is really paying for, though it never appears on the spreadsheet. We count what is easy to count, plays, subscribers, market share, and then mistake the count for the thing. A map of a river is not wet. When the sliver of a percentage gets thinner, the hit survives; hits always do. What goes is the slack: the extra week, the risky collaboration, the writer who would have given it one more year.

Music is an odd thing to price because, unlike most things, it isn’t trying to get anywhere. Nobody listens to a song to reach the end of it. The point is the playing. A system that only values the arrival will keep paying for the end of a journey it has never taken.

So I’d make one modest suggestion to everyone at that table. Before you settle on a number, spend a week where songs are actually written. Watch three gifted people spend a whole day on eight bars. Stay up for the moment, usually late, when the room goes quiet because everyone has heard the same thing at once. Then go back to the number and see whether it still looks right.

Songs are worth fighting for before they exist. That, it seems to me, is the whole point.

Source: AllHipHop, “Amazon Music Seeks Lower Songwriter Rates for 2028”, 18 October 2026. allhiphop.com