Myanmar had 39.8 million internet users at the end of 2025, a penetration rate of 72.5 percent, according to DataReportal’s Digital 2026: Myanmar report.
The best-performing Myanmar act on Spotify, rock band Big Bag, sits at 85,853 monthly listeners on the Music Metrics Vault country tracker, which counts 37 Myanmar artists on the platform in total.
Both numbers are accurate. The distance between them is a rights and distribution problem, not a talent problem.
The copyright law only switched on in 2023
- The Copyright Law (Pyidaungsu Hluttaw Law No. 15/2019) was enacted on 24 May 2019 but did not commence until 31 October 2023, per Tilleke and Gibbins.
- The enabling Copyright Rules landed under Ministry of Commerce Notification No. 70/2023, dated 23 October 2023, eight days before commencement.
- Registration now runs through the Intellectual Property Department, filed electronically, in person or by post.
- Terms: life plus 50 years for musical works, 50 years for performers, 50 years from publication for phonogram producers.
- Myanmar is a WTO TRIPS member but is not a party to the Berne Convention, so foreign protection hinges on first or near-simultaneous publication in Myanmar.
Three thousand copy songs
Writing for IPLINK Asia in December 2025, Laavanya Jain describes “Copy Thachin,” the long-running practice of re-recording global hits with Burmese lyrics and releasing them as local product.
Jain puts the figure at more than 3,000 copied songs normalised as local music under the 1914 statute, and estimates that piracy and corruption combined have drained over USD 1 billion a year from Myanmar’s film and music sector.
The old law’s definition of a musical work also excluded digitally created content. A producer working in a DAW in 2019 had thinner protection than a session player in 1975.
The chapter nobody has filled
CMO means collective management organisation, the body that licenses public performance and broadcast use and pays writers and performers their share.
Sections 60 to 62 of the 2019 law create the legal slot for one. Nobody has filled it with a functioning, audited society. Jain’s assessment is blunt: Myanmar has no collecting body with operating experience.
That leaves the recording side, the money that flows from streaming platforms to whoever controls the master, as the only reliable rail in the country.
Home listening is legally awkward
- Facebook and its associated apps have been blocked since 2021, which matters in a market where discovery historically ran on Facebook video.
- A cybersecurity law took effect on 1 January 2025 penalising unauthorised VPN use, with penalties of up to six months in prison and fines up to 2 million kyats, reported by Radio Free Asia.
- Social media identities stood at 21.0 million in October 2025, only 38.2 percent of the population, well below the 72.5 percent internet figure.
The consequence: a meaningful share of a Myanmar artist’s audience sits in Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, the United States and the United Kingdom, listening on platforms that pay at those markets’ rates.
What actually pays a Myanmar artist in 2026
Diaspora streams settle at export payout rates. That is the whole economic argument for getting delivery right.
- Register the work with the IPD anyway. Protection is automatic, but a certificate is what you hand a lawyer.
- Own your ISRCs. ISRC means International Standard Recording Code, the identifier that ties a stream anywhere in the world back to your master.
- Deliver beyond Spotify. YouTube Music, Apple Music, JOOX, Boomplay and the regional stores where your diaspora actually listens.
- Split at source. With no CMO to reconcile against, per-collaborator splits configured at delivery are the only clean paper trail.
InterSpace Distribution ships DDEX-standard deliveries to the regional platforms majors-focused distributors skip. DDEX means Digital Data Exchange, the metadata standard that keeps your credits intact between your hard drive and a store in Kuala Lumpur.
Myanmar’s neighbours are further along on the same curve. Cambodia has no official chart, Indonesia is sitting on Rp70 billion in unclaimed royalties, and six Southeast Asian countries now share a single official chart fed by four DSPs.
Myanmar is not on that chart. The law that would put it there has been in force for under three years.
