Indonesia has written a use-it-or-lose-it clause into its public performance royalties, and the clock has already started.
Under LMKN Decision 001.SK.LMKN.IV.2026, repertoire that draws money only from the unlogged pool for two consecutive periods, with no verified usage data behind it, becomes ineligible for that pool in the period after.
What LMKN actually changed
LMKN means Lembaga Manajemen Kolektif Nasional, the state-sanctioned body that collects public performance royalties in Indonesia under Law 28 of 2014 and Government Regulation 56 of 2021.
The 2026 policy came out of a 15 April meeting with the individual member societies, according to ANTARA. It splits every collection into two tracks:
- Log sheet: the venue, broadcaster or promoter files actual usage data, and royalties follow the plays.
- Non-log sheet: nobody files anything, so LMKN falls back on sampling, proxy data, and a new allocation called UPA.
UPA means Unlogged Performance Allocation. It is set at 20 percent of royalties collected from music users who never submit usage data, and it is passed through the member societies.
Marcell Siahaan, LMKN’s chairman for related rights owners, put the logic plainly in that announcement: “The more accurate the data, the more accurate the distribution will be.”
The size of the guess
LMKN’s own breakdown puts the July to December 2025 UPA distribution at Rp4,627,077,246:
- 10,074 songwriters and copyright holders shared Rp2,234,449,383.
- 1,830 performers shared Rp1,151,313,932.
- 556 producers shared Rp1,151,313,932.
Divide it out and the average songwriter in that pool cleared around Rp222,000 for six months of a whole country’s bars, broadcasters and karaoke rooms.
Producers, drawing the same rupiah total across a claimant pool eighteen times smaller, averaged above Rp2 million each.
That gap is not a measure of who was played more. It is a measure of how many claimants are standing in front of the same fixed 20 percent. Data-based distribution began phasing in from early June 2026, which is what is meant to replace the guess.
The court fixed who signs the cheque
In December 2025 Indonesia’s Constitutional Court struck down three articles of the Copyright Law, including Article 23(5), in a petition filed by Armand Maulana of GIGI, Ariel of NOAH, Afgansyah Reza and Raisa Andriana.
Justice Enny Nurbaningsih ruled that the party holding detailed knowledge of ticket sales is the event organiser, so the organiser owes the royalty rather than the artist on stage, as The Jakarta Post reported.
That removes a liability an Indonesian performer should never have carried. It does not put a log sheet in anybody’s hands.
Two rails, two matching keys
The performance rail now matches money to people using a document a third party has to file. If that third party skips it, your catalogue drifts toward the sleeping-repertoire rule by default.
The recording rail matches on a code you control. Every stream reconciles against an ISRC carried in your delivery metadata, which is why the same catalogue can be invisible at a karaoke chain in Bandung and fully accounted for on a platform statement in the same month.
DDEX means Digital Data Exchange, the messaging standard that carries that identifier from a distributor to a DSP.
What an Indonesian rightsholder should do before the next period closes
- Register with an LMK now, and treat performance income as a separate stream from streaming, never a substitute for it.
- Chase log sheets from the venues, promoters and broadcasters you actually work with. Under the new rule, unlogged is a countdown.
- Audit ISRC and UPC assignment across the back catalogue, including reissues and live recordings that were never coded properly.
- Lock splits before release. A retroactive split change is the slowest correction available in either system.
- Keep artist name spellings and featured-artist credits identical across every delivery. Fuzzy matching is what turns a play into an unlogged play.
The distinction worth holding onto is simple. One of these systems pays you because somebody else did the paperwork. The other pays you because you did.
Related reading: Indonesia has Rp70 billion in unclaimed music royalties, and Indonesia is Southeast Asia’s biggest music market with fewer than 1 percent paying for it.
