‘Songwriters deserve a higher share’: new Imro boss Seán Donegan on streaming and AI

Seán Donegan has been dining out on a chance encounter with a rock star for nearly 20 years.

It was 2007, before the incoming chief executive of the Irish Music Rights Organisation (Imro) worked in the music industry, and the venue was Time Nightclub in Naas, Co Kildare.

Donegan was playing pool upstairs with friends when he got a tap on the shoulder from a big bouncer. His message was: “You’re going to have to give up the table.”

“I asked why. He goes, ‘There’s some VIPs who want the table’ and I said, ‘Well, my euro is down, so tell the VIP they can play the winner’. Next thing I know, Ronnie Wood from the Rolling Stones walks in.”

Wood, who lived nearby in Clane, waited his turn and for the current game to finish.

“He comes up to me, shakes my hand, and I set up the table. I hit one, miss. He comes up, doosh, doosh, doosh, doosh, doosh, and completely eliminates me.

“He shakes my hand again, gets into a photo, and the next thing we’re just being ushered away with red velvet rope going up. He was very gracious about it.”

From a young age, Donegan wanted to work in music. When he was 12 and living in Clondalkin, Co Dublin, he was in the audience for the children’s show Hiúdaí TNT on TG4 and won an acoustic guitar.

“That was my start in music,” he says. “Then I got an electric guitar for Christmas, and that set me off in terms of my musical career.

“I’ve been very passionate about music since then. In Clondalkin there’s an Irish cultural centre called Áras Chrónáin, which would have regular trad sessions. When I was between 16 and 18, myself and my friends loved to hang around there and watch.”

When Donegan finished school, his mother encouraged him to pursue that passion for music. That advice led him to Ballyfermot College of Further Education, where he studied music technology, but it was his evenings and weekends spent in venues such as Eamonn Doran’s and Temple Bar Music Centre that helped him get a foot in the door of the industry.

“When I was in college, a couple of friends of mine had a band in Clondalkin called The Circus, kind of a rock band,” he says. “They needed a bass player. I wanted to be the guitarist, but the only position available was bass.

“We were quite good; we just never got our big break. Then around 2008, I saw that Imro were hiring for a live music licensing officer. I talked my way into that job because I knew a lot of the venues around town from playing them. I knew the promoters. I knew what was happening, and as a result of that I got into Imro.”

Imro licenses the use of copyright music in Ireland and collects royalties on behalf of artists when their pieces are played or performed.

Donegan remembers the role, which was his first in the business world, as “a bit of an eye-opener”.

“I walked in with my music technology degree, thinking I’m brilliant, but the people I was dealing with, both externally and internally at Imro, they had finance, MBA and accountancy qualifications.”

He went to TU Dublin, called DIT at the time, to upskill and did a master’s degree in strategic management, which led to doing exams to become a chartered management accountant.

Donegan, who left Imro after three years in 2011, spent stints with Sony Music and the Irish Copyright Licensing Agency before returning to Imro in 2014 as its director of broadcast and online licensing.

“Victor [Finn], the chief executive, gave me a call because a position had come up on the senior management team, which he said he always had me in mind for,” he says. “He has been a great mentor to me and helped me grow that position into the chief commercial officer role over time.”

This month, Imro announced Donegan would step up from his current chief commercial officer role, which he has held since 2022, to succeed Finn as chief executive of the company next July. He will take on an organisation that has been growing at a significant rate in recent years.

The organisation’s latest annual report showed licence revenue hit an all-time high of €57.1 million in 2025, up from €52.9 million the previous year, while distributions to members rose by €2.4 million to €48.4 million. In the year, Imro also added 5,139 new members, which means the organisation now represents more than 30,000 music creators.

Donegan says the growth in turnover and members is down to a conversation he and Finn had around four years ago.

“Victor and I sat down, and we felt we were doing a really good job serving the Irish creators in the Irish market, and felt there’s no impediment for artists and songwriters based outside of Ireland to join us.

“We did something almost like a roadshow where we went out to the UK market, the US market and continental Europe and spoke to big publishing companies, artist managers, artist lawyers to basically set out what Imro could do on behalf of their artists.”

The outreach has led to an influx of writers from more than 100 other countries joining Imro to avail of the same services it has provided to Irish artists.

Imro’s international business is going to grow further next year due to new partnerships Donegan has helped deliver in his role as chief commercial officer.

The company recently announced a partnership with the London-based Mechanical Copyright Protection Society to manage its international processing and collections from early next year. This month, Imro announced a separate arrangement that will involve administering online performing rights for writers belonging to SESAC in the US.

Donegan says Imro can take on these workloads because the organisation’s systems are “entirely scalable”. He adds the extra revenue from these deals will help reduce costs and get more money out to Irish songwriters.

When he assumes Finn’s position next July, Donegan says international growth will continue to be a focus of Imro, but he emphasises any expansion of its remit will have to benefit members.

“We do want to grow Imro outside the Irish market, and any venture we get into we’re only getting into it if it’s going to benefit the Imro members.”

He says he has not lost sight of Imro’s role to argue on behalf of members in negotiations with big music streaming companies such as Spotify and Apple Music.

“We have licences with all the big streaming services. I won’t get into any specifics, but we’re always in dialogue with them about the share going towards songwriters.”

Some of these streaming companies Imro engages are behemoths. Spotify, which paid out more than $11 billion (€9.9 billion) to the music industry last year, is on track for record annual operating profit of more than €2.9 billion this year. Apple Music doesn’t report stand-alone revenue and profit, but total net income was more than $112 billion last year.

Are these streaming services, which have each announced price hikes this year, paying artists a fair share of their earnings?

“I think we’re entering into a new phase of streaming,” Donegan says. “Maybe 10 to 15 years ago, it was all about getting legal access to music and getting people away from the piracy sites.

“We’re entering a new phase now with the monetisation of streaming. On average, Irish people spend about €170 per year on streaming services, but if you look at the price of a music streaming service now compared to what a video-on-demand streaming service is these days, so you’re talking €11.99 versus €20.99 now, there’s probably room to grow in terms of the price of the streaming services, and we would argue that songwriters deserve a higher share of that income definitely.”

He says that alongside arguing for a greater share of the earnings, Imro is pushing for better data from the streamers. The music industry has, for many years, sought clean data from streaming companies to help inform artists who are listening to their music and where.

“Our members expect their royalties, of course, but they also expect the underlying data behind it,” Donegan says. ‘That’s why we’re going to launch a new member portal at the end of this year, which is going to give Irish writers a real granular view of their streams from Spotify in Sweden and Apple Music streams in Thailand.

“We’re going to make all that data available to our members because it’s their data. You can actually inform career decisions off the back of that, like touring. A lot of the established [streamers] are working with us in good faith on it, so please don’t take this as a criticism of it, but there’s more work to be done in terms of cleaning up the data.”

Imro’s role of maintaining open dialogue with streamers such as Spotify and Apple Music has been long established, but it faces a fresh pressure to engage with a whole new stream of tech companies involved in artificial intelligence (AI).

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Donegan says the technology presents challenges, but he was keen to play with the AI services that can generate music as soon as they came out due to his music technology background.

“My first reaction was, ‘Oh my God. I spent three years in college learning how to do this stuff properly and now with a couple of prompts it just makes the whole process easier’. But the important point I want to make here is, despite using these services and creating outputs, I have yet to hear an AI song that has captured my attention for longer than 20 seconds.

“They can create music, but they can’t replicate the soul and the emotion and the lived experience that only a songwriter can put down into words.”

He says that, even though AI services are rapidly advancing, songwriters are not afraid of it.

“They work with AI in the production process, but if someone uses your work, you’re entitled to choose whether you want to license it or not, and that’s what needs to happen,” Donegan says.

“We need the AI companies to be transparent about what they train on, and get the relevant permissions, just like any other industry out there. It’s as simple as that. The music industry is more than capable of licensing AI.

“I was talking to Danny O’Donoghue from The Script recently. One-hundred-and-twenty-five of his songs are in one of these training data sets [being used by AI companies]. The way I see it, there are thousands of businesses around Ireland right now who are using music and have taken out the correct licence to use that music. What is different with an AI company using the world’s music to train their data sets? Why shouldn’t they be licensed?”

At present, all Imro members’ rights are publicly reserved, which means AI companies can’t avail of a data and text mining exemption under copyright rules to train their systems. Donegan says he wants the industry to get to a point where Imro can ask members if they want to opt into an AI licence.

“Some members may not want to, some may,” he says. “It’s up to the member to have that choice and get their consent for it. It’s something the sector is well capable of doing; we’ve been issuing licences and identifying music uses for years.

“We’ve done an outreach to any AI company that has been offering a music streaming service or a music generating service. I think the AI sector themselves are probably awaiting the outcome of various court cases that are running through in various jurisdictions at the moment, but we’ve made our position clear. We’re open to licensing on fair and reasonable terms, and we’re willing to engage with them.”

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In Imro’s recent pre-budget submission, AI was mentioned as an “emerging threat” faced by musicians, but the document predominantly focused on recommendations like helping to encourage Ireland’s live music scene.

One such idea was a culture card, which young adults could use for live music and other cultural experiences.

“I feel the gigs you go to follow you throughout your life. Myself and my brother are big Damien Dempsey fans,” Donegan says. “We have an annual tradition going back 20 years where we meet up for his Christmas Vicar Street shows. My wife and I are together nearly 20 years. One of the first date nights we had was a David Kitt gig. We tend to mark important milestones every couple of years by going back to see him live.

“We want to try to give young people access to music, to be able to go to their local live venues. That’s where the next bands and musicians will come from.”

In September, the Sunday Independent reported how Minister for Arts Patrick O’Donovan had secured the so-called culture card, valued at €100 per person, as part of his Budget 2027 negotiations.

On the eve of the budget, O’Donovan suggested funding had been secured, but on budget day itself, Minister for Public Expenditure Jack Chambers said there was no budget funding for it, creating a flashpoint between two high-ranking members of Cabinet.

Was Imro’s submission the origin of the culture card idea that caused the political scuffle? Donegan leans in and speaks in a semi-hushed tone.

“I’m actually not sure, but we’re certainly still advocating for it.”

Name: Seán Donegan

Job: Incoming chief executive of Irish Music Rights Organisation

Age: 41

Family: My wife Lisa and two children, Liam (12) and Cliodhna (9)

Hobbies: I play guitar and I coach an under-10 girls soccer team, which takes up a lot of my time

Something you might expect: Like many men my age, I do marathon running

Something that might surprise: I’m a fluent Irish speaker