Living Wage for Musicians Act of 2025

The Living Wage for Musicians Act would establish an Artist Compensation Royalty Fund designed to provide additional payments to musicians when their music is streamed. Currently, musicians receive very small per-stream payments from streaming services—typically around $0.003 per stream on platforms like Spotify. This bill would create a new funding mechanism where streaming services would charge an additional fee to subscribers and collect a percentage of non-subscription revenue, with these funds deposited into the new royalty fund.

The fund would be administered by a nonprofit organization and would distribute payments directly to both featured artists and non-featured artists like session musicians and background vocalists. Payments would be based on the number of streams each artist receives. The bill aims to ensure musicians can earn a sustainable living wage from streaming, with a proposed minimum of approximately one penny per stream. A maximum payout per track per month would help distribute funds more broadly across diverse artists rather than concentrating payments on the most-streamed content.