In February 2025, Sacem teamed up with Deezer to introduce an artist-centric royalty distribution model, for a fairer allocation of streaming revenue to artists. This heralded a major shift in the economic model, which has remained largely unchanged since the beginning of the music streaming era, more than fifteen years ago.
©Mojahid Mottakin
This model is designed to generate bigger royalties for rights-holders by ensuring that the platform better rewards and supports real working artists and their original musical works and recordings.
The first royalty distribution under this model is scheduled for 6th October 2025.
ADVANTAGES OF THE ARTIST-CENTRIC MODEL AND ROYALTIES CALCULATION
Tackling unwanted content and fraud to protect and increase royalties distributed to artists and musical works:
- Deezer’s catalogue has been cleaned to remove functional noise or non-musical sounds (white noise) and streams identified as fraudulent by the platform. This means that the overall amount of royalties to be distributed increases in favour of music content, as it is no longer diluted by streaming fraud and streams of non-musical content.
- Furthermore, for a fairer redistribution of royalties, a stream limit, or cap, has been introduced per user, limiting the individual impact of heavy users (more than 1,000 streams per user per month) and the risk of fraud. For example, for a user who listens to 2,000 streams in a month, their streams will count as half, compared to a user who does not exceed the threshold of 1,000 streams per month.
A better deal for professional artists and creators:
The artist-centric model ensures that the works of artists with an active fan base receive a fairer share of revenue.
With the traditional market-centric model, the value for one stream is the same for all streams over a given period. With the artist-centric model, the value of streams is weighted to allow for a fairer distribution of royalties based on the following criteria:
- Rewarding and boosting works by professional artists: for every stream for artists with a minimum of 1,000 streams per month by a minimum of 500 unique users, their remuneration will count for double.
- Better remuneration for active streams: an active stream is defined as a stream made following a specific search for a track or album, or a stream from a personalised or editorialised playlist, compared to passive streams (radio, music streaming, algorithmic playlists). Each active stream of a track is equivalent to two streams.
DATA DISTRIBUTED ON 6 OCTOBER 2025
For Deezer, the artist-centric model has replaced the market-centric model for all paid streaming in France.
This first royalty distribution concerns streams from the first quarter of 2025.
Discussions are underway as to whether this model will be rolled-out across other territories and other platforms.
ROYALTIES BREAKDOWN
Like before, a breakdown of these royalties is available on the distribution statement (Family: Online, Type of Use: Streaming, User: Deezer).
A breakdown is also available online via your Sacem member account, in the "My Detailed Distributions" section, with details by type of offer or subscription.
In the "Export My Data" section, you can export a specific online file with data on the number of streams per work. This is the number of actual streams, as declared by Deezer before the artist-centric model is applied and therefore before any weighting – upwardly or downwardly – is applied to the number of streams actually
Published September 12 2025