Morocco’s parliament spent July closing a 26-year gap. On July 13, the Chamber of Advisors adopted draft law 13.26 by 46 votes with one abstention, a week after the House of Representatives passed it 85 to 35, Morocco World News reported.
The statute it amends, Law 2-00, has been in force since February 15, 2000, according to WIPO Lex. It was drafted before streaming, before social platforms, before generative models.
What law 13.26 actually changes
- Publishing contracts now explicitly cover digital content, not only print and physical exploitation.
- Judicial and customs enforcement against digital piracy and illegal distribution of audiovisual content is strengthened.
- BMDAV gains wider powers. BMDAV means the Bureau Marocain du Droit d’Auteur et des Droits Voisins, Morocco’s collective management organisation. A CMO, or collective management organisation, is the body that licenses public performance and collects royalties on behalf of authors.
- Commercial use of folklore expressions and public-domain works, meaning works whose author died more than 70 years ago, now requires BMDAV authorisation and a royalty payment.
- Journalists get formal recognition of moral and material rights as authors.
The folklore clause matters more than it reads. Gnawa, chaabi and Amazigh repertoire has been lifted into Moroccan rap and European dance records for years with no clearing step. There is now a named counterparty on the other side of that sample.
The part the law does not touch
Law 13.26 governs the authors’ side and the domestic collection side. It does not change how a Moroccan artist gets paid when a recording is streamed in Paris, Montreal or Dubai.
That money moves on a different rail: platform to distributor to artist, settled against ISRC codes. ISRC means International Standard Recording Code, the 12-character identifier that tells a streaming service which recording earned which play.
The scale gap is the whole story. ElGrandeToto logged roughly 411 million Spotify streams in 2025 and has been Morocco’s most-streamed artist five years running, per DimaTOP. Almost none of that is CMO money, a point we covered when we mapped where Morocco’s biggest rapper actually earns.
Why Moroccan artists stayed sceptical
The bureau carries history. In 2022, ElGrandeToto and SmallX went live on Instagram to allege that BMDA distributed its roughly MAD 200 million annual creator budget to a small circle of older insiders while internationally active young artists collected nothing, Hespress reported. Artist unions rejected that year’s reform bill outright on April 15, 2022.
The bureau was restructured under Law 25-19 in 2022. In 2026 it publicly reasserted that its public-performance collections from hotels, cafes, gyms, cinemas and festivals are legal rights payments rather than taxes, Le360 reported. Its tariff schedule still traces to a Bulletin Officiel publication dated April 14, 2014.
CISAC’s own Morocco case study notes that once the bureau began private copying collections in 2017 and distributed them in 2018, music distributions tripled. Progress is real. It is also slow, and it is domestic.
The pattern is regional. Saudi Arabia’s first neighbouring rights law lands on August 12, and in West Africa BURIDA now publishes quarterly payout figures while Ivorian certifications arrive from France and Nigeria. Legislatures are catching up on the publishing side while the recording side keeps running on distribution.
What a Moroccan artist should do in the next 90 days
- Register compositions with BMDAV. It is the only accredited route to Moroccan public performance and private copying income.
- Keep that mentally separate from recording income. Your distributor handles master royalties; the CMO does not.
- Audit ISRC and ownership metadata across the back catalogue before the new enforcement provisions bite. Mismatched and unclaimed recordings are the single biggest leak in the chain.
- Register writer splits before release rather than after a song charts. Retroactive split corrections at a CMO take quarters, not weeks.
- Check the DSP map covers where the audience actually sits: France, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Canada and the Gulf, not Morocco alone.
Morocco fixed the law it could fix. The rest of a Moroccan artist’s income still arrives through delivery, metadata and split reporting, which is why that side of the business deserves the same attention this parliamentary vote just got.
