IMPALA published its Digital Music Plan 2026 — five priorities to reform the digital music market. The document explicitly accounts for markets facing war.
On July 1, IMPALA — the association of independent music companies in Europe — published its Digital Music Plan 2026. The document follows a two-month review: IMPALA surveyed stakeholders, drew on the expertise of its own member labels across Europe, and built on prior research — including an assessment of the two-tier streaming economy and the European Commission's report on the discoverability of diverse repertoire. IMPALA aims the recommendations at both sides — streaming platforms and labels/distributors, large and small, independent and major.
Five priorities
1. Increase revenues and share them fairly. IMPALA calls for closing "value gaps" — situations where money doesn't reach musicians: inflation platforms don't offset with price increases, royalty dilution by unrelated content bundled into the same subscription (podcasts, audiobooks), monetisation thresholds, and minimal remuneration from social media and UGC platforms.
2. Supercharge support for new, independent and diverse music. Platforms should maintain a minimum baseline of local editorial expertise in every country they operate in, and eliminate "rightsowner or financial bias" in their algorithms.
3. Establish trust through industry-wide provenance labelling. Tags that show whether a label signed the track (independent or major), the artist self-released it, it's library material, or AI generated it — naming the tool used.
4. Stop fraud and AI dilution. This covers fake streams, fake artists, bots, and artificially sped-up or slowed-down tracks. IMPALA's proposal: unlicensed AI content is automatically infringing and should be blocked from upload, monetisation and discovery; licensed AI content should be labelled and kept in separate spaces, not mixed into the same royalty pools and recommender systems as human-made music.
5. Reduce climate impact and strengthen collective innovation. Fewer duplicate catalogues, shared emissions-reporting standards (per track, per play), and use of IMPALA's carbon calculator and facilities like Murmur.
Monetisation thresholds — the sharpest point
IMPALA directly calls monetisation thresholds "fundamentally unfair" and demands they be removed:
"Monetisation thresholds based on number of plays or listeners are another value gap. They are fundamentally unfair and must be removed. Music that is streamed should be remunerated."
If music is streamed, it should be paid for — regardless of play count. For independent labels this is a direct revenue question: most Ukrainian catalogues don't reach major-platform thresholds and go unpaid for streams that actually happened. IMPALA also calls on labels and distributors to apply the WIN Fair Digital Deals Declaration — sharing advances, guarantees and equity from platform deals transparently across all represented artists, not selectively.
Platforms are already experimenting — examples from the document
The plan cites concrete examples. SoundCloud, Lissen and Cantilever are testing alternative royalty models, while Deezer — the original proponent of the user-centric model — is moving even closer to it. Spotify launched a verification badge for real artists; Deezer runs an AI detection and tagging system; YouTube labels content made with Google's AI tools. On how to treat AI content, platforms diverge sharply: Tidal announced it will pay no royalties at all for AI-generated content, while Deezer blocks such content from its recommender systems.
Central and Eastern Europe — a recognised problem
The plan names Central and South Eastern Europe directly as an example of a market under-represented in algorithmic recommendations and editorial support. The European Commission research IMPALA cites found that local-language recommendations drop to 0% when non-local inputs feed the algorithm, and that larger markets systematically dilute smaller ones that share their language.
The plan accounts for war
Notably, the document explicitly accounts for markets facing exceptional circumstances such as war: the recommendation for streaming platforms to raise prices and revise free tiers may not apply to such markets.
A 12-month check-in
IMPALA commits to assessing progress on the plan in twelve months, with help from partners across the ecosystem.
SPILNA's position
We will be watching how these recommendations affect the Ukrainian market.
Full plan available at impalamusic.org.