On 12 March 2026, Senegal’s music rights society began paying out 82,448,229 FCFA, roughly 146,000 US dollars. The headline number is unremarkable. The line-item breakdown is the whole story.
CMO means collective management organisation, the body that licenses music users and collects on behalf of songwriters, composers and performers. Senegal’s is SODAV, and here is how that March payout split.
Where the 82 Million Came From
- 56,340,056 FCFA from religious content delivered as CRBT
- 15,608,173 FCFA from other digital music delivered as CRBT
- 10,500,000 FCFA from radio
CRBT means Caller Ring Back Tone, the audio clip a mobile subscriber hears instead of a dial tone. Roughly 87 percent of that payout was carrier product revenue, not streaming revenue.
The lag matters as much as the mix. The digital portion covered the second half of 2024. The radio portion covered the second half of 2025. An artist collecting in March 2026 was being paid for ringtones sold about 18 months earlier.
The Annual Numbers Say the Same Thing
SODAV’s 2025 results, reported by Le Soleil via allAfrica, show 677 million FCFA collected and 429 million FCFA redistributed across 13,035 members and around 98,000 declared works.
Director general Aly Bathily framed that as more than three quarters of receipts going back to rights holders, consistent with international collective management norms. Board president Ngoné Ndour’s society also has a receivables problem: roughly 655 million FCFA outstanding, plus 486 million FCFA in anticipated distributions owed.
Put plainly, SODAV is owed almost as much as it collects in a year. An extraordinary general assembly is planned to revise the bylaws.
The Levy That Still Is Not Collecting
Private copy remuneration, a levy on imported blank media and recording devices, has been on Senegal’s books since Law 2008-09 of 25 January 2008. The president raised making it effective at the Council of Ministers on 21 January 2026.
Sunu Afrik Radio reported that two months later nothing had moved. Bathily has called the levy a strategic priority for the sector’s financial autonomy. It remains a line item waiting on enforcement.
Meanwhile, the Recording Money Left Through a Different Door
In October 2025, rapper Dip Doundou Guiss signed an exclusive distribution deal with Sony Music Africa Francophone, with releases, concerts and visual content mapped across 2026. That deal moves recording revenue. It does not touch SODAV’s publishing and neighbouring-rights rail at all.
The same split shows up at the discovery end. Dakar duo Def Mama Def and singer Sym Sam were named among ten finalists for the RFI Prix Découvertes 2026. Whatever streaming those placements generate on Spotify, Deezer, Apple Music, Audiomack and Boomplay lands on a distribution statement, quarterly or monthly, not on an 18-month CRBT cycle.
What a Dakar Artist Should Actually Do With This
- Register with SODAV anyway. Publishing and neighbouring rights are a separate income stream from your recording royalties. Skipping registration forfeits money you cannot recover elsewhere.
- Do not budget against CRBT. Treat carrier ringback income as a delayed bonus, not working capital. Plan on your distributor’s cycle.
- Declare every work. The 98,000 declared works figure against 13,035 members suggests plenty of catalogue is still undocumented.
- Watch the export DSPs. Rap galsen and mbalax travel into France, Italy and the Senegalese diaspora. Boomplay and Audiomack matter at home; Deezer and Spotify carry the diaspora share.
- Keep your splits documented. Mbalax sessions are collaborative. Undocumented percussion and chorus credits are the most common reason a payout gets stuck.
The Distribution Read
Senegal is not short of rights. It is short of throughput. A society that collects 677 million FCFA a year while carrying 655 million in receivables cannot be the primary cash engine for a working artist.
The practical answer for francophone West African artists is to run both rails at once: CMO registration for performance and private copy income whenever it arrives, and a distributor that delivers to the platforms where the audience already is, with reporting that shows which territory and which DSP paid what. InterSpace Distribution built its regional DSP coverage and its royalty reporting around exactly that gap.
Related reading: BURIDA’s quarterly payout in Côte d’Ivoire and why South Africa books 78 percent of Sub-Saharan Africa’s recorded music market.
