Glocalization: Global Consumption, Local Rules

There’s never been a better time to be a global music fan. Korean pop groups dominate the Billboard charts. Latin megastars headline the world’s biggest festivals. Afrobeats is on everyone's playlists. A user in Jakarta can stream a Nashville singer-songwriter seconds after their release… music’s reach is truly borderless.

Photo by Cord Allman

As digital platforms have fuelled an explosion in global consumption, they’ve also exposed a long-standing issue at the heart of rights management: music may travel instantly, but royalties don’t. We’re only slowly moving on from licensing, tracking, and attributing rights using systems built for a pre-digital, territorial world. The natural result is inefficiency, opacity, and missed value for songwriters and publishers.

With the rise of AI-generated content and diverging copyright regimes across jurisdictions, the cracks in the system are only likely to widen again.

Global consumption has always been fundamentally at odds with local licensing- but where do we go from here?

A Global Business Trapped in Local Frameworks

Music’s monetisation systems were birthed in the Victorian age, and in some respects haven’t evolved much since- only reacting (often when forced) to evolutions in formats and distribution. Radio, Vinyl, CD all depended on territory-specific manufacturing, retail and broadcast channels. Licensing followed suit. PROs and CMOs naturally fitted an already carved-up world, monopolising exclusive territories and depending on reciprocal agreements to manage repertoire abroad. This made sense when ‘Foreign’ revenues were at a minimum compared to ‘Domestic’. It worked well, for a time.

But the streaming era, along with digitisation in general, has changed everything. Consumption is now truly global. A track can be uploaded in Lagos, go viral in Berlin, and get synced in a Netflix series shooting in Mumbai. Yet the rights administration behind that journey is routed through a tangled web of national societies, overlapping mandates, and slow data pipelines.

The friction caused by this mismatch- between how music is consumed and how it’s administered- has become impossible to ignore. And for songwriters in particular, where performance, mechanical, and sync royalties typically travel via different channels and are claimed by different entities in each country, it can feel like revenue is being continuously falling through the gaps.

Multi-Territorial Licensing: A Work in Progress

To meet the demands of the digital age, new models of multi-territorial licensing have emerged in the last 7-8 years. It's worth noting this is also lagging 4-5 years (if not more) behind the wider digitisation of the industry. Each model comes with trade-offs, and none are yet perfect:

1. Combined PRO Hubs (e.g. ICE, MINT)

ICE (created by PRS, GEMA, and STIM) and MINT (a JV between SUISA and SESAC) represent attempts by national societies to pool rights and offer pan-European or wider territorial licences for rights that cross borders like digital (mutli-territory online licensing, MTOL). They aim to improve licensing leverage and efficiency via scale- and they’ve made progress. But coordination among multiple societies with different priorities, systems, and payout methodologies is never simple. Governance can be slow, and innovation constrained by consensus.

2. Major Publisher SPVs (e.g. SOLAR)

Sony and PRS/GEMA’s SOLAR represents another approach: creating a single vehicle to license and administer a specific publisher’s repertoire across multiple territories. This centralises control and allows for more consistent deal terms and faster licensing, without pooling with competitors. While disintermediating local societies, it also consolidates the power of a high-leverage catalog with a given PRO. There is a chance this outsized power creates fallout for the society’s other members, who by mandate, should be treated equally. If a policy direction doesn’t benefit the largest rights holder, will it be implemented?

3. Publisher-Driven Global Admin (e.g. Universal/SACEM, AMRA)

Universal Music Publishing partners with SACEM for its digital admin. Meanwhile, AMRA- acquired by Kobalt but run as an independent entity- offers a direct model that bypasses local societies altogether. AMRA collects royalties first-hand from DSPs in over 200 territories- claiming to reduce friction, speed up payouts, and improve transparency.

It’s a smart play- it's the most radical, and arguably, the most future-facing. But it’s not without scrutiny. The fact that AMRA is owned by Kobalt raises questions about neutrality. Can a CMO owned by a rights holder serve all its clients fairly? Similar scrutiny may extend to SACEM as it deepens its ties with Universal.

It’s worth noting those with larger repertoire, as ever, are the ones that can define the rights map- indies or single songwriters are subject to the frameworks others create (although this is also one of the benefits of the ‘Hub’ model to aggregate rights and negotiate licenses ‘as one’).

Friction at the Frontiers

Despite these advances, significant challenges remain at the local level:

• Licensing Overlaps: It’s never been easier to split one’s rights and have them distinctly licensed- but messy data means in some territories, multiple entities claim rights to the same work or usage, leading to double claims, delayed payouts, and ongoing disputes.

  
  

• Data Fragmentation: Many societies still operate without infrastructure for a digital age, with varying standards for works registration, cue sheet ingestion, and usage reporting. As usage volumes increase, are they able to keep up? Or will they require back office services from societies that have already invested heavily- e.g. PRS/ICE.

  
  

• Opaque Royalty Flows: Rights owners often receive payments without clear usage data, or awareness of who the money has flowed through. This makes it hard to verify value or spot discrepancies- an auditing nightmare.

  
  

• Slow Money: It can still take 18-24 months for royalties to flow from DSPs in one country to a songwriter in another. The intent of ‘publisher share’ and ‘writer share’ is to protect writers and allow them facility to check this. The volumes (and data formats) involved however make this practically impossible.

Issues are compounded when rights data is incomplete or inconsistent. This is particularly the case for older catalogs or works with complex ownership histories or that have changed hands many times.

And of course, different countries apply different copyright rules. What qualifies as a “mechanical right” in one market might be bundled differently in another- e.g. China. Performance thresholds, collection rules, and moral rights vary significantly, all of which complicate multi-territorial licensing and collections further.

As generative AI enters the music mainstream, these infrastructure issues could soon become fundamental crises.

AI-generated tracks trained on vast datasets, often without consent, are likely to soon flood platforms and blur the lines between original and derivative works. If attribution is unclear, how can royalties be accurately split? And if different jurisdictions apply different standards to what counts as infringement or fair use, how can platforms license consistently?

Unless global stakeholders align on shared attribution frameworks, interoperable metadata standards, and transparent rights registries, the growing tide of generative content will overwhelm already stretched systems.

What Needs to Happen Next

The current climate calls for a step change in how the industry thinks about rights admin. Here’s what that might look like:

• Cross-Border Standards: Shared metadata schemas (e.g. DDEX), universal identifiers (ISWC, ISRC, IPI), and clean ownership data are prerequisites. Without these, there’s no attribution, no accountability, and no efficient monetisation.

  
  

• Transparent Registries: We need shared works and rights databases that are open, for all stakeholders to contribute to and verify. Data should not be a defensive moat, but a friction reducer- a growth accelerator.

  
  

• Interoperable Licensing: A future-proof system should allow for real-time licensing, micro-transactions, and attribution across markets, platforms, and formats. It may sound like a 2019 conference Smart Contract/Blockchain panel, but the issues are still present and the technology is available to facilitate more granular operations. The deeper question is whether the key stakeholders are willing to incorporate such thinking?

  
  

• Artist-Centric Opt-Ins/Outs: Particularly with AI, artists should have control over whether their work is used for training- and that choice should be recognised globally. This is central to the AI discussion- tech lobbying should not undermine the value of copyright and incentives for creators to create. Personally, I don’t want to lose the empathy found in human creation. Protecting creators is paramount.

  
  

• Regulatory Alignment: Lawmakers must resist the temptation to legislate in isolation, or in a competitive manor to attract AI investment from other territories. A patchwork of local rules risks creating even more complexity. Global problems need global principles, and a willingness to collaborate.

Final Thoughts

The music business has always danced between innovation and inertia. While tech development reshapes how we make, share, and consume music, the backend of rights management should be forward thinking to avoid needing to play catch-up.

The gap is in danger of widening. And with AI, it's could become a chasm.

If we don’t modernise the way we license, track, and pay for music in a global economy, we risk locking the next generation of creators out of the value chain entirely.

Lets collaborate to build systems that match the reality of the music market today, not the territorial frameworks of yesteryear.