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Inside the Fastest-Growing, Most Complicated Sector of the Music Business

Collective management organizations, known as CMOs, are seeing record growth in Europe. Trying to sort through their business is another matter.

The growth is fast enough to make the whole alphabet soup of initials exciting to the point of attracting investment-backed rivals to the traditional nonprofits — think BMI, which just took on outside investment, or Kobalt’s AMRA. Until about a decade ago, the traditional collective management organizations, known as CMOs, licensed rights within a given territory for compositions played in public — at concerts, in stores and restaurants, on television and radio, and eventually from streaming services. STIM gets 73% of its income from foreign and online royalties, so to some extent its success is tied to that of Swedish songwriters who write for global pop stars, although it has to make sure they can’t get a better deal from another CMO.

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