Two fights are underway, and most songwriters are only watching one of them. The first is a rate setting proceeding in Washington that will decide what streaming services owe for the compositions behind every on demand play from 2028 through 2032. The second is a growing pile of copyright cases, licensing deals, and product launches that will decide what artificial intelligence companies owe for learning from the music in the first place. Different arenas, same question: when a machine plays your song or learns from it, what is that worth?

We track both closely at Sunset Music, because both land on the same desk. Here is where each one stands as of this week.

Phonorecords V: The Streaming Rate Fight Begins

Every five years, the Copyright Royalty Board sits down to set the mechanical royalty rates that streaming services pay in the United States for the compositions they stream. The current round, known as Phonorecords V, will govern interactive streaming for the five years beginning in 2028. Spotify, Amazon, Apple, Google, and Pandora are among the participants on the services side. Publishers and songwriter organizations, including the National Music Publishers Association and the Nashville Songwriters Association International, are on the other. Record labels and independent music groups are in the proceeding too.

The calendar is already set. Unless the sides settle first, hearings are scheduled to begin on March 22, 2027, with an initial determination expected by December 17, 2027. Written testimony and rate proposals were filed in recent days, and the services have already responded. The opening exchanges point toward a long process.

To understand what is at stake, start with the rules now in force. The last proceeding ended in a 2022 settlement between publishers and the services, which set rates for 2023 through 2027. Under that deal, the headline mechanical rate rises to 15.35 percent of applicable revenue, but the structure also lets a service pay less on subscriptions that bundle music with something else. Spotify used that provision in 2024 after adding audiobook listening to its Premium plans, and Amazon later took a similar path. The NMPA has said the bundling approach cost songwriters nearly half a billion dollars in mechanical royalties, and the Mechanical Licensing Collective is pursuing litigation over the issue. Those are the publishers’ figures and claims, and the services see the rules differently, but nobody disputes that bundling is now the central grievance.

That explains one of the more interesting proposals on the table. A group of songwriter organizations, including the Songwriters Guild of America, is backing a plan that would replace the current web of formulas with a flat per stream rate, adjusted each year for inflation. We like the instinct. A writer should be able to look at a statement and understand how a number was reached. When a rate depends on definitions that only a handful of accountants can parse, the people who wrote the songs end up trusting the math instead of checking it.

A separate piece of the proceeding is moving toward settlement. The major labels, the NMPA, the NSAI, independent music groups, and others have asked the Judges to approve a deal covering physical products, permanent downloads, and ringtones. It would leave the existing structure in place with continuing cost of living adjustments. Supporters stress that this does not roll the rate back to twelve cents, which is the base figure from 2023. They say each year’s rate will be that base plus the accumulated inflation since late 2022, which is how the 2026 rate came to 13.1 cents per song.

The Machine Learns to Pay

Now to the second fight, which moves faster and with less predictability. Suno, the AI music platform, raised more than 400 million dollars in June at a valuation of 5.4 billion dollars, and says it has passed two million paying subscribers and 300 million dollars in annual recurring revenue. On September 9, it launched v6, a new generation of models built in partnership with Warner Music Group, BMG, and Believe. Every earlier model was retired the same day.

The sequence matters. Warner settled its lawsuit and licensed Suno in November 2025. BMG followed in August, with an arrangement that lets its artists and songwriters choose whether to take part. Believe, the distributor behind TuneCore, signed in September. Along the way Suno capped monthly downloads and committed to watermarking and fingerprinting its output. Its product chief has said a portion of revenue will now be shared with its music partners. A company that spent years arguing it needed no licenses has, at least with some rightsholders, changed course.

The case against it is far from over, though. Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment never settled. They sued in 2024 in federal court in Boston, and on September 18 they filed a second suit covering more than 60,000 recordings. That complaint argues the new v6 models inherit what earlier ones learned from their catalogs, and calls the new release a continuation of the same conduct rather than a fresh start. Suno calls the claims flawed on both the facts and the law, and says v6 was trained partly on licensed catalogs and partly on creations and preference signals from its own users. In the first case, Suno has acknowledged obtaining audio from YouTube using a download tool for training purposes, while defending itself on fair use. None of this has been decided. Key motions on fair use are not due until June 2027.

The pressure is not only coming from Boston. Round Hill Music sued Suno in August, and the Canadian collecting society SOCAN filed its own case in early September. In July, a court in Munich ruled in favor of the German society GEMA and found that Suno infringed copyright, the first European decision of its kind. Suno is weighing an appeal, and the judgment is not final. Italy’s competition authority has also opened an investigation into Suno’s consumer terms, and a group of artists has brought a proposed class action built on identity claims rather than copyright. Whatever one thinks of any individual case, the direction of travel is plain. Licensing is becoming the price of admission.

The Publishers’ Front

Songwriters should also watch what is happening on the publishing side of the AI debate. Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell sued Anthropic at the end of August, adding to an earlier claim filed in January by Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord, and ABKCO that seeks more than three billion dollars. Anthropic confirmed in June that it had confidentially submitted draft paperwork for a public offering, and OpenAI disclosed a similar confidential filing a week later while its own copyright litigation remained unresolved. The courts so far have not spoken with one voice. A judge found that training on books was fair use in a case involving Anthropic, which later agreed to a 1.5 billion dollar settlement with authors, while a federal appeals court in late September rejected a fair use defense over AI training in a separate dispute involving a legal research company. Neither ruling binds a music case, and each side will cite whichever one helps it.

What It Means for Writers

Put the two fights side by side and a pattern emerges. In Washington, the argument is about how to count and price a stream. In the courts, the argument is about whether a song has to be licensed before a machine can learn from it. In both places, the people who wrote the music have the weakest voice unless someone is advocating for them by name, which is the reason organizations like ours exist.

Our view is simple. Rates should be transparent enough for a writer to verify. Licenses for AI training should be opt in, paid, and traceable. And a licensing deal signed by a label or publisher should not quietly decide the fate of a writer who was never asked.

In practical terms, there are a few things worth doing now. Make sure every composition is registered correctly, because both streaming royalties and any future AI revenue sharing depend on clean data. Ask your publisher or administrator, in writing, whether your catalog is part of any AI licensing arrangement and whether you have the right to opt out. Read the terms of any AI tool you use yourself, especially anything that grants the company a broad license over what you create. And keep an eye on the Phonorecords V calendar, because the outcome will shape mechanical income for most of the next decade.

None of this will resolve quickly. Hearings begin next March, motions are due next summer, and the first rulings may not land until the end of 2027. The writers who understand the terrain now will be the ones best positioned when the decisions finally arrive. We plan to keep reading every filing so you do not have to.