Every copy of a rap album pressed onto vinyl this year owes the people who wrote its songs a fixed cost. The Federal Register puts it at 13.1 cents per song, or 2.52 cents per minute of playing time when a track runs long. A 16-track double LP sold in 2026 carries a little over two dollars in songwriting money, divided among every rapper, producer and sampled composer named in the credits. That amount is the mechanical royalty, and for the five years beginning January 1, 2028, the three major labels and the country's largest publisher and songwriter trade groups have already agreed on what it should be.

The Copyright Royalty Judges, the three-member federal panel that sets the rate, have not signed off. In an order entered this month, Chief Judge Trevor Jefferson sent the settling parties ten questions with a response deadline of Friday, October 2. The first one goes straight at the calculation that divides the deal's supporters from the songwriters objecting to it.

"Does the settlement include a mechanical base rate of 12 cents? If so, why is it reasonable for the mechanical floor rate to not track increases in the CPI-U?"

The proceeding known as Phonorecords V will decide what songwriters earn on vinyl, CDs, downloads and ringtones through 2032. The objectors, including the Michigan publisher that holds rights to much of Eminem's early catalog, argue that the deal quietly moves the floor backward while leaving a 2009 ringtone rate untouched for another five years.

What the Settlement Says

The agreement was filed in late June under Docket No. 25-CRB-0013-PR. The judges published it in the Federal Register on July 10, 2026 with comments due August 10. Its songwriter-side signatures belong to the National Music Publishers' Association, the Nashville Songwriters Association International and the Music Artists Coalition. On the label side it is signed by Sony Music Entertainment, UMG Recordings, Warner Music Group and the independent-label association A2IM.

The parties propose that the rates and terms "presently set forth in 37 C.F.R. Part 385 Subparts A and B should not be amended except for continuing inflation adjustments to the rates for physical phonorecords and permanent downloads." Subpart B covers physical copies, permanent downloads, ringtones and bundles, the formats where a buyer takes a copy home. The streaming mechanicals that Spotify and Apple Music pay run on a separate track of the same proceeding and are not part of this deal.

Songwriters of North America told the judges that "the proposed settlement generally represents a reasonable and practical resolution that preserves the important progress achieved during the Phonorecords IV proceeding."

The Twelve-Cent Question

The progress SONA wants to preserve came in Phonorecords IV, which lifted the physical and download rate to 12 cents per song in 2023. The rate had sat at 9.1 cents since 2006. The new rate was indexed to inflation each year, which carried it to 12.7 cents in 2025 and to 13.1 cents on January 1, 2026.

The Songwriters Guild of America and Word Collections argue that the new deal restarts the index from the old base rather than from where inflation has since carried it. In their filing, they wrote that the deal "seems intended to ensure that the 'new' Phonorecord V base rate will NOT begin at the current rate of 13.1 cents or more, but would in reality be lowered back to a reset rate of 12 cents on January 1, 2028." Their second complaint concerns the base itself, since the 12-cent figure captured inflation only through the end of 2020. Counting the price surge of 2021 and 2022, by their math, would have put the starting point at 13.6 cents. Their counterproposal lands near 15.6 cents per work once cumulative cost-of-living changes since 2020 are counted.

Nobody on the settling side has conceded that a reset exists, and the judges' question is phrased as an open one. What the order does establish is that the panel wants a written answer before it treats the deal as the industry's consensus. Rick Carnes, president of the Songwriters Guild, answered the order with a statement: "We are simply looking for a deal negotiated at arm's length that benefits all parties, including America's independent music creators, who deserve transparency, clarity, and a strong voice in negotiating fair rates of remuneration for the use of their copyrighted works."

A Ringtone Rate From 2009

The oldest number in the deal belongs to a format that mid-2000s rap and R&B hooks helped turn into a business. In the first Phonorecords determination, which took effect March 1, 2009, the judges ruled that "the appropriate Section 115 license rate is 24¢ for ringtones." The same document set physical and download mechanicals at 9.1 cents, a figure that has since risen by roughly 44 percent. The ringtone rate has stayed at 24 cents, and because the settlement's inflation language names only physical phonorecords and permanent downloads, it would stay there through 2032, twenty-three years after it was set.

That freeze is the objection pressed by Eight Mile Style, and the judges listed it among the three they want answered by October 2. The publisher called the proposal "effectively a rate freeze, unmoored from economic reality and for which no valid justification exists." Eight Mile Style has fought the streaming business over mechanicals before, suing Spotify in 2019 over more than 240 Eminem compositions, a case a federal judge in Nashville decided in Spotify's favor in 2024.

Ringtone revenue is small now, which is one reason a freeze could pass without much notice. The principle Eight Mile Style is arguing is larger than the format, because a rate that never moves loses value every year it stands. A songwriter whose hook still sells as an alert tone in 2032 would be collecting at 2009 prices.

The Clause Rappers Sign Before the Rate Reaches Them

For most rappers, the statutory figure is a ceiling they never touch. Artists who write their own verses usually sign recording contracts with a controlled composition clause. Eight Mile Style's filing describes the standard version bluntly: "[T]he unconscionably cruel controlled composition clause in recording agreements reduces the mechanical royalty by 25% and fixes the rate at the time of release." A rapper-songwriter on a major label typically collects three quarters of whatever the judges set, locked at the rate in force the week the album came out. Every cent the base loses in 2028 travels down that chain.

The clause bites harder on the records this genre makes. A hip-hop album built on samples and interpolations carries outside writers on nearly every track. Many contracts also cap the total mechanicals a label will pay per album, which leaves the artist absorbing the difference when sampled writers are owed the full rate. The split sheet decides who shares in that money long before the rate does, a mechanism we traced from the producer's side in our guide to what a leased beat does and does not include.

Who Sat at the Table

Each major label that signed the deal is part of a company that also owns one of the largest music publishers, and those publishers help lead the NMPA. Eight Mile Style's filing outlined it this way: "The corporate overlap between the bloc of the Settlement Parties comprised of the Majors (effectively an oligopsony) and their vertically-integrated publishing company affiliates which serve as executive members of the NMPA, results in a walled garden where the 'willing buyers' and 'willing sellers' are the same at the corporate level." The Society of Composers & Lyricists raised a conflict-of-interest objection along the same line.

The judges wrote the point into Question 9. It asks whether the settling parties would voluntarily hand over "negotiation documents, emails, or other materials, evidencing the corporate separateness or common ownership across the Movants" to show the deal reflects "an arm's-length negotiation between willing sellers (licensors) and willing buyers (licensees)." Chris Castle, the music lawyer who has tracked the proceeding closely, wrote after the order: "Rather than simply accepting a deal presented by NMPA, NSAI, MAC, Sony, Universal, Warner and A2IM as representing an industry consensus, the Judges have required the settling parties to come back and explain themselves."

The willing buyer and willing seller language comes from the statute that governs how the judges set rates, which asks what a fair market would produce. When a label and a publisher answer to the same parent company, the price one pays the other is partly a transfer between divisions. The songwriter outside that structure is the party with no seat at the table.

What October 2 Decides

The physical business these rates govern is not shrinking. We reported this month that physical formats grew 25.9 percent in the first half of 2026, with vinyl revenue up 17.7 percent. A soul reissue or a deluxe rap box set that ships in 2029 will pay its writers whatever this proceeding settles. The judges can adopt the deal, reject it and send the Subpart B rates to a full hearing, or ask for more. The ten questions and the three objections are due back on Friday, October 2.

Streaming mechanicals, which pay far more to most hip-hop writers than vinyl ever will, are still being contested on the other track of Phonorecords V. Whatever the judges decide about the 12-cent question is likely to shape how that fight is argued. An artist reading a royalty statement in 2030 will not see a docket number on it, only a per-unit rate, and the rate on that line is being set now.