The Music Royalty Transparency and Tracking Issues
An investigation into why the music industry can track everything except where the money goes
by Nina Katashvili
The music industry has become exceptionally effective at identifying copyrighted content, tracking infringement, and is now slowly shaping policy around artificial intelligence. Transparency and independent audit, however, is a not quite simple, yet. The same companies that can detect a three-second sample buried in a TikTok video cannot—or will not—provide creators with itemized statements showing exactly which streams generated which payments, which deductions were applied, and how the final figures were reached. This is not a technical limitation, it is a governance failure.
Major music companies continue to invest heavily in technologies capable of identifying recordings, gathering ownership information, sorting out metadata, detecting infringement, and increasingly tracking how music is used on AI-powered platforms. In the first half of 2026 Universal Music Group alone disclosed approximately $700,000 in lobbying expenditures. According to their disclosed reports, this amounts are directed to focus on copyright law, artificial intelligence, anti-piracy enforcement, platform accountability, digital replicas, and creator rights.
Additionally, over the past several months, the industry has witnessed a tsunami like wave of announcements centered around artificial intelligence. Warner Music acquired technology, Sureel AI, designed to track artist usage in AI systems last month. Deezer introduced additional AI detection tools.
David Israelite, who is the President & CEO of the National Music Publishers Association announced a licensing agreements on June 11th, 2026 with AI music companies, more specifically with Klay and Udio.
In an official statement on NMPA’s own website, Israelite’s remark states:
Litigating against bad AI actors and licensing good AI partners is not in conflict,” Israelite explained. “NMPA will do both… There has been hesitancy to make mistakes in these early deals, but there has not been any deal offered across the entire market until today.
The industry can identify music, track music, license music, and protect music. Shazam can identify a song from a few seconds of audio in a crowded bar. Content ID detects copyrighted assets within minutes of uploading. Music distributors track streams across dozens of platforms in near real-time. Rights management systems parse complex ownership splits and route payments to multiple stakeholders. But ask an artist for a detailed breakdown of how their royalty payment was calculated, and the system falls apart. That’s our current system.
I have spent most of 2026 studying in depth and tracking the U.S. Copyright office activities. Simultaneously, I’ve been working with Jo Loewenthal, who's currently suing Universal Music Publishing in NSW Supreme Court (AU) over a copyright and royalties dispute and is on a track to develop a comprehensive framework that could improve the tracking and transparency in music industry. I'm also investigating a separate case involving a New Zealand artist, Alexandra Hainsworth, who sued The Orchard, a Sony Music subsidiary, over similar issues. While examining the structural failures in music royalty transparency, this investigation has traced the flow of money from streaming platforms through distributors, performance rights organizations, publishers, and labels-documenting where information breaks down and where accountability vanishes in ether. In one case I reviewed, an artist's statement showed 47,000 streams generating $12.83. When I asked the distributor for a per-stream breakdown, they told me to contact the platform. The platform told me to contact the distributor. Neither could explain the math.
The evidence I’ve gathered points to fragmented governance, outdated statutory frameworks, conflicting metadata standards, inadequate audit rights, and a conspicuous absence of the transparency mechanisms that have become standard in nearly every other sector handling comparable transaction volumes. The current royalty system was built for physical sales and terrestrial radio. It has been retrofitted-imperfectly and incompletely-to handle billions of micro-transactions generated by streaming platforms, user-generated content sites, fitness apps, gaming platforms, and now AI training databases. The result is a patchwork of intermediaries, each maintaining their own data systems, applying their own methodologies, and operating under different regulatory frameworks.
Recently, Traxsource announced plans to introduce Human-Made and AI-Assisted labels across its marketplace. The goal is simple: provide DJs and consumers with greater visibility into how music was created. Rather than prohibiting artificial intelligence outright, the platform chose disclosure.That logic is difficult to argue with. If transparency is valuable when discussing artificial intelligence, why should it be any less valuable when discussing artist compensation? If consumers deserve visibility into how a track was created, artists deserve visibility into how revenues generated by that track are calculated and distributed.
Today a smartphone can identify a song playing in a crowded nightclub within seconds. DJ software automatically records track histories. Streaming platforms process billions of listening events every day. Artificial intelligence can recognize recordings, organize ownership data, and classify content at extraordinary speed. The technological assumptions that justified opacity have materially changed. The systems themselves have not.
For decades, informational scarcity justified approximation. Today, informational abundance demands verification. As technology continues removing barriers to attribution and identification, the conversation can no longer focus exclusively on collection. It must also focus on
accountability.
The music industry stands at a crossroads. Time to act is right now. The industry can continue investing in technologies that protect incumbents while leaving creators in the dark about their own earnings and how it was calculated in the first place. Or it can apply the same level of innovation and resources to transparency that it has applied to enforcement. The technical barriers are minimal. What's missing is the political will to demand change and the collective effort from all music genres and platforms related to music to start acting before it’s too late.t
Over the coming months, Unmixed will be publishing a detailed study examining the systemic failures in music royalty governance and proposing a framework for reform. I will document where the current system breaks down, identify the policy changes needed to fix it, and outline what genuine transparency would look like in practice. The industry has proven it can identify a song in seconds. It's time artists could verify their royalties just as quickly.
This is the first in a series examining modernization failures in music royalty transparency. The full study will be released in phases throughout 2026.
