South African Music Rights Oligarchy

‘The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.’ – Hunter S Thompson

- Struan Douglas

HOW COME SO MANY GREAT SOUTH son to believe that the oligarchy of the South African Music Rights Organisation (Samro) might have had more than a little to do with it.

Despite numerous complaints over the years, Samro continues to be accused of a lack of transparency in its financial dealings and remains subject to little or no oversight.

For a start, Zeus, the R70-million computer system that Samro installed years ago to track the use of its members’ music – on radio, television and in performance – has never worked. (A board member describes it as “a permanent headache”.) Radio stations have noted that, while their play sheets differ radically from year to year, the total royalty amount they are billed for by Samro year after year remains suspiciously the same.

Samro’s core business is to take assignment of the performing rights of members’ music and songs and then license these rights, including broadcasting rights to users for a royalty fee. According to its 2018 financials, Samro collected R471.9m in royalties and distributed R370.7m to members

Samro has the monopoly on rights in South Africa on behalf of the International Standards Organisation (ISO) to issue International Standard Musical Work Codes (ISWC), a global reference standard for identifying each musical work, and the Interested Party Name-Number used to identify each interested party in a musical work.

All authorship and ownership claims, the splits and other metadata are stored on a CIS-net database controlled by the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (Cisac). Cisac has 239 member CMOS (collective management organizations) across 123 countries.