In a decision published on 14 January, the Copyright Tribunal of Australia gave recording artists and labels their first rise in the commercial radio licence rate in a generation, lifting it from 0.4% to 0.55% of the industry’s gross revenue, backdated to 1 July 2023. While a 38% increase is to some extent a success, it does not account for the figure over which the Tribunal had little power to exercise. Section 152 of the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth) forbids it from ordering a commercial broadcaster to pay more than 1% of gross earnings for the recorded music it plays. The Tribunal acknowledged the cap “may be described as ‘arbitrary’” and said it “has always shaped how the parties negotiate”, and PPCA, the society that collects these fees, counted at least 140 references to it in the decision.
The same section caps what the ABC can be ordered to pay for the recordings it uses at half a cent per head of population per year, which comes to about $125,000, across every ABC station from triple j to local radio. Songwriters face no cap of any kind. Radio pays APRA AMCOS roughly ten times as much for the songs as it pays PPCA for the recordings of them.
These are Australia’s neighbouring rights settings, which determine who gets paid, and how much, every time a recording is played in public. Most artists are familiar with the royalties arising from their songwriting, but few can say the same of how the second royalty works, why so little of it is received from overseas, or that an artist who fails to register by 31 August each year has that year’s share paid to their label instead.
Two copyrights in every song
Every recorded song attracts two copyrights. The first is in the musical work, the melody, chords and lyrics, and it belongs to the writers and, commonly, their publisher. The second is in the sound recording, being the recorded performance of the work that you hear, and it usually belongs to whomever commissioned it, which is often the label or artist that paid for it to be recorded. Play a song on the radio and both copyrights apply at once. The writers are paid through APRA AMCOS. The recording component is paid through PPCA, which licenses broadcasters and public venues and distributes the money to record companies and to registered Australian artists.
The phrase “neighbouring rights” comes from the Rome Convention of 1961, and it describes rights that exist beside copyright in the composition, the rights of performers, of record producers and of broadcasters. Australian law never formally adopted this label. The Copyright Act grants a copyright in the sound recording itself, and deals with performers through a mix of part-ownership rules, consent rights and a voluntary payment scheme.
Since 1 January 2005 a performer has co-owned the copyright in a sound recording of their live performance, unless the recording was commissioned or made under a contract of employment, which is why a session musician paid for a given session might not own a share of the master, whereas a friend who sings on it for free might. Performers also have moral rights in their performances and can withhold consent to bootlegs. What no Australian performer has is a statutory right to be paid when the recording is broadcast or played in public.
Who pays, and who gets paid
PPCA collected $65.4 million in licence fees in 2024-25. Public performance licences sold through OneMusic Australia, the joint initiative it operates with APRA AMCOS, brought in $38.3 million from venues, gyms, salons, retailers and workplaces. $24.4 million was brought in via broadcast and online licenses, and the share of this attributable to commercial radio is only about $5.5 million a year even at the new rate, being 0.55% of commercial radio’s roughly $1 billion in annual revenue. In December 2025 PPCA distributed $48.25 million to 4,615 licensors, mostly labels, and 5,947 registered artists.
PPCA allocates half of the net income attributed to a song to the recording’s owner and half to its featured Australian artists. The artist half is paid only to artists who have registered. Registration is free, no funds are held in reserve, and the share of an artist who has not registered by 31 August in a given year is paid to the label. Session musicians aren’t included in the scheme at all. And because the Act grants performers no remuneration right, the artist share arises from PPCA policy rather than an entitlement inherent at law.
Importantly, Spotify and Apple Music streams do not qualify for neighbouring rights income. They are licensed directly by labels and distributors and paid under those agreements. Radio webstreams are also a category of their own, since the Full Federal Court held in 2013 that an online simulcast of a radio program is not a “broadcast”, so the statutory caps protect the transmitter and not the stream. In the United States, satellite and internet radio pay a statutory royalty collected by SoundExchange, split 45% to featured artists, 5% to session performers and 50% to the recording’s owner, and Australians can collect it.
The caps
The caps date from 1969, when Parliament, urged by broadcasters who cast airplay as free promotion for records, wrote a ceiling into the new Copyright Act. Commercial radio has sheltered under it for more than half a century. The practical rate was about 0.4% of revenue for 25 years, about $4.4 million a year for an industry with about $1 billion in annual revenue, while comparable overseas markets negotiate rates of about 1.5% to 4%. The United States pays no terrestrial radio royalties on recordings at all, and never has: when Congress created a digital performance royalty in 1995, terrestrial broadcasters successfully lobbied to be left out of it, branding the payment a “performance tax”. It is often observed that the only other countries that pay nothing are North Korea and Iran, and Congress revisits the question every few years. The US is the outlier here, not the model, and among countries that do pay, PPCA says Australia is the only one that caps the fee by statute.
Radio has rejected the case for change. When a Senate committee recommended in June 2024 that Senator David Pocock’s repeal bill not be passed, the chair of Commercial Radio & Audio, Ciaran Davis, said the bill “would have had dire consequences” for the 260 stations his body represents, and pointed instead at “multinational record giants” profiting at artists’ expense. However, Mandala, the advisory firm PPCA commissioned, modelled removal and found artists receiving airplay could earn up to 78% more, an extra $4.8 million a year in total, while the largest stations kept 15% profit margins. On those numbers, uncapping the royalty is a rounding error for radio and a pay rise for every artist it plays.
Across borders
About 80 countries pay neighbouring rights, being US$2.9 billion in 2025 according to IFPI, 9.3% of global recorded music revenue. In most of those countries the law grants performers “equitable remuneration”, an unwaivable share of broadcast and public performance income, collected by societies such as PPL in the United Kingdom and paid to featured and session performers alike.
Australia joined the Rome Convention in 1992 and the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty in 2007, and each time filed a declaration refusing the article that grants performers equitable remuneration, Article 12 of Rome and Article 15(1) of the WPPT. The consequences of this have been reciprocal. At home, performers have no right to broadcast income, which is why the PPCA artist share is a policy as opposed to a legal obligation. Abroad, societies apply reciprocity, paying foreign performers only where the performer’s own country pays back, and Australian law provides little to satisfy this criteria. PPL and PPCA maintained a working arrangement until it broke down in 2014, and UK payments to Australian featured artists stopped.
The cost of this to Australian artists has been significant. Good Neighbour, an Australian neighbouring rights agency, estimated that Tones and I gave up between $500,000 and $1 million in UK income on a single recording. The promoter Michael Chugg called the collapse “the COVID that hit our Australian industry”. On the estimates by Good Neighbour, equitable remuneration on a single well-played recording can be worth between $5,000 and $70,000 a year to a session musician in the UK system. An Australian session player, on the other hand, has to make do with only their session fee.
However, Australian labels are paid in many markets as copyright owners. SoundExchange lists PPCA as its Australian partner and pays Australian artists for American digital radio play. Some artists qualify in some territories through where a recording was made or first released, which can be charted with the help of a specialist. What has yet to change is the performer’s statutory share, because none exists here to reciprocate.
Reform
The caps are closer to falling than they have been in 57 years. Pocock’s Copyright Legislation Amendment (Fair Pay for Radio Play) Bill 2023 would repeal them outright. It lapsed when Parliament rose for the 2025 election and was restored to the Senate notice paper on 23 July 2025, where it remains. The Senate committee that declined to endorse it asked the government to test removal with a cost-benefit analysis instead, and on 24 March 2026 the government agreed to support one. PPCA counts six independent reviews that have recommended removal, artists from Tones and I to John Farnham back it, and PPCA’s chair, the songwriter Josh Pyke, calls removal “simply the right thing to do”. As at 28 August 2026, the analysis has not been released, and the cap remains at the same rate.
An important second vehicle is the AI training licences the government has promised will operate on the same basis described above, the societies, the registrations and the splits (see our article from last week on AI and Copyright to learn more). Today, AI licence fees for recordings would flow to recording owners with no statutory share for the people who performed on them, and the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance has already asked for an inalienable right to payment in any AI scheme. The neighbouring rights ledger, capped at home and closed abroad, is the strongest argument for writing performers into the next round of copyright reform rather than repeating the compromise of 1969.
What can artists and labels do now?
1) Register with PPCA before 31 August
If you are a featured Australian artist on a released recording and have never registered, do it now. Registration is free, it covers you for the December distribution, and a missed year is money paid to your label, since no funds are held in reserve. Register your recordings as well as yourself, and keep ISRCs and line-up details accurate, since the allocation is made pursuant to that data. Artists who own their masters should also register as licensors.
2) Collect the American royalty
US digital radio money is real and collectable from Australia. Register with SoundExchange directly, or ask PPCA about collection through its arrangement. The featured artist share is 45% and it cannot be redirected to your label without your authority.
3) Map where else you qualify
Eligibility overseas must be determined by reference to each territory, where the recording was made, who performed on it, where it was first released. A recording made in London or Auckland may qualify where an identical one made in Sydney does not. Specialist neighbouring rights agencies are able to assist with this work. Ask your distributor and your label what they already collect on your recordings, in which markets, and how it reaches you.
4) Read the recording agreement
Check how your agreements treat PPCA income and overseas neighbouring rights, since older deals are often silent on this matter. New recording, licensing and distribution deals should say who registers, who collects in which territory, and ideally how any AI licensing income will be shared.
5) Say something
At the moment two processes are ongoing, the cost-benefit analysis on the caps and the consultations on the AI licensing scheme. Both will be decided on submissions, so it is worth asking ARIA, AIR, the AAM and the MEAA what they have put in on your behalf. Ask your society what it has asked for on performer shares. The last time these settings were written, in 1969, nobody asked the performers, and the industry has spent 57 years with the consequences.
The Tribunal has moved the rate as far as the law lets it move. Parliament wrote the cap, and only Parliament can remove it. Until it does, every recording on Australian commercial radio plays for a fraction of its value, the national broadcaster’s recorded music bill is half a cent per citizen, and the world’s performer royalties flow around Australia rather than through it. Artists have spent half a century being told the exposure they receive for airplay is the payment.
If you would like advice on what these settings mean for your recordings or your agreements, we would be glad to hear from you.
This article is general information, current at 28 August 2026. It is not legal advice, and must not be relied upon as such. No lawyer-client relationship is created by reading this article.
