Higher payouts, lower costs: GEMA closed the 2025 financial year with an excellent set of results. The total distributable amount came to EUR 1.15 billion (2024: EUR 1.13 billion), total earnings came to EUR 1.34 billion (2024: EUR 1.33 billion). Much like the music market as a whole, GEMA achieved strong growth despite difficult trading conditions. Rigorous cost management, combined with the carefully planned digitisation and automation of the society’s administration, reduced the overall cost ratio by 0.8 percentage points to 14.1 percent. GEMA is holding its own in a music market characterised by disruption and geopolitical headwinds, once again demonstrating how dependable the collecting society is as a partner to more than 100,000 members.
The main growth drivers were the live and background music sectors in Germany, as well as digital business. Music brings people together – in clubs, bars and concerts. Smaller and medium-sized events, including parties and regional music events, performed especially well, generating higher revenues than in previous years. Further optimisation of processing workflows allowed GEMA to collect fees from roughly 85,000 more events in the small and medium-sized events market than in 2024. This largely offset the fall in revenue from the declining number of stadium events and large-scale concerts, as well as the one-off impact of the European Football Championship in 2024. The 870,000 events that took place in 2025 put the financial year on a par with the previous year. Overall, live and background music business generated income of EUR 530 million (2024: EUR 502 million).
“The music market is experiencing profound changes, and GEMA is actively shaping this transformation. We’re modernising our structures, showing how reliable we are as a partner to our members, and steadily expanding our international network. At the same time, we’re systematically championing our members’ rights — as demonstrated by the court ruling against OpenAI in November 2025, which represented our first success in the AI marketplace. It also shows how we’re building the foundations of a sustainable licensing market and ensuring that use of our members’ creative work is fairly remunerated, even in entirely new contexts,” commented Dr Tobias Holzmüller, CEO of GEMA.
GEMA’s digital revenues also continued to grow, led by music-on-demand business. New agreements with major digital service providers, including platforms such as Spotify and Amazon Music, further boosted revenues. Revenues from the video-on-demand sector also rose again in 2025, increasing by EUR 4.1 million. Income for both sectors totalled EUR 328 million in the financial year, representing a EUR 17.8 million increase over the previous year (2024: EUR 310 million).
“2025 was not an easy year for the economy as a whole. So it’s all the more gratifying that GEMA achieved such an excellent set of financial results yet again. While our figures show a decline in sectors such as the advertising market and physical audio recordings, the positive trends in the live music and online business sectors more than offset this shortfall. What’s more, GEMA is steadily growing its international business, representing the rights of numerous creative rights-holders abroad – an area in which we see plenty of future potential for growth. Our goals for 2026 remain clear: to preserve GEMA’s financial stability and so guarantee the best possible payouts for our members,” added Lorenzo Colombini, CFO of GEMA.
In 2025, GEMA continued to pursue its service-focused development strategy. This included completing the society’s cloud migration project, which has resulted in greater flexibility, faster processes and improved system stability: Members and customers benefit from more reliable services, shorter processing times thanks to AI solutions in day-to-day operations, and faster payouts too. At the same time, key systems were modernised so that data and payouts could be managed more efficiently and transparently. GEMA also enhanced automation in the live-music sector: for the most part, event data is now captured and processed automatically.
In Germany, GEMA represents the copyright interests of more than 100,000 members (composers, lyricists and music publishers), as well as over two million owners of intellectual property rights worldwide. It is one of the world’s largest collecting societies for creators of musical works.
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Further details of key topics and GEMA’s financial performance in 2025, as well as the society’s transparency report, can be found on our website: https://geschaeftsbericht.gema.de/en