Armenia’s entire collective licensing system runs through one non-profit. ARMAUTHOR was founded in 2001 and is still the only organisation performing collective copyright management in the country.
CMO means collective management organisation: the body that licenses public performance and broadcast of songs, then pays composers and publishers.
At a WIPO and CISAC national workshop in Yerevan on 26 and 27 November 2025, ARMAUTHOR General Director Marine Avetisyan said the quiet part out loud. Armenia, she noted, still has no specific legislative framework for collective management.
One society, 1,500 rightsholders, no dedicated statute
Armenia’s Law on Copyright and Related Rights was adopted by the National Assembly on 15 June 2006 and has been amended since. Nothing in it amounts to a standalone collective management act.
Workshop participants were asked to file comments on a draft law with the Intellectual Property Office of the Ministry of Economy by 15 March.
The scale of what is being regulated is modest. EVN Report found ARMAUTHOR working with roughly 1,500 rightsholders, taking a 15% administrative fee, and holding 468 licence agreements in 2019 with theatres, concert halls, broadcasters and restaurants.
What ARMAUTHOR does not touch
- Performance rights only. The society licenses public performance and broadcast of musical works inside Armenia, and pays songwriters, composers and publishers on that use.
- Not the master. Recording revenue from Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and Yandex Music does not pass through the society at all. It arrives through a distributor.
- Not the diaspora. ARMAUTHOR collects for international writers whose works are used in Armenia through reciprocal agreements. The return leg only works if an Armenian writer is registered with a counterpart on the other side.
The domestic pool is small by construction. DataReportal’s Digital 2026: Armenia counts 2.36 million internet users, 80.0% of a population of 2.95 million, and that user base shrank by 17,000 year on year.
Social media identities rose 6.5% to 1.65 million over the same period. Attention is growing. The paying domestic audience is not.
The Rosa Linn arithmetic
Armenia’s biggest streaming story of the decade never depended on any of this. Rosa Linn represented Armenia at Eurovision 2022 with “Snap,” the song went viral on TikTok after the contest, and she signed with Columbia Records in August 2022, as Forbes reported.
She had already been picked up by Nvak Collective, the label and songwriting incubator that found her performing in Armenia. “Snap” has since passed a billion streams, a milestone she discussed with Stardust Magazine.
Those plays were counted in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and Poland. A perfectly drafted Armenian collective management law would not have moved a cent of that recording money.
What actually pays an Armenian act in 2026
- Register the composition twice. ARMAUTHOR for domestic performance, plus a publishing administrator with global reciprocal reach for everything outside Armenia.
- Route the master through a DDEX-native distributor. DDEX means Digital Data Exchange, the metadata standard DSPs use to match a release to a payment. Bad metadata is the most common reason money sits unmatched.
- Build for the diaspora map. Los Angeles, Moscow, Paris and Beirut will out-stream Yerevan for most Armenian releases. Deliver to Yandex Music and VK alongside Spotify and Apple Music, not instead of them.
- Split at source. Producers and features in a market with no CMO statute should not be waiting on a manual bank transfer. Per-collaborator reporting settles who is owed what before anyone has to argue about it.
Why the draft law is only half the story
The reform matters. It would professionalise a society running on a 2006 statute, a 15% fee and a lot of goodwill, and it would give Armenian broadcasters and venues a rate framework worth enforcing.
But it regulates the smaller half of an Armenian artist’s income. The larger half already leaves the country as a delivery file and returns as a distributor statement, and that half is available to every act in Yerevan today, law or no law.
Related reading: Kazakhstan changed its royalty rules twice in two days, Uzbekistan licenses 1,100 singers, and Turkish music passed 294 billion Spotify streams.
