Paramaribo got a straight answer about its music royalties in February. It came from a French society.
At a session hosted by Alliance Française Suriname with SACEM and the French embassy, SACEM regional representative Emmanuelle Bruch told the room that Surinamese artists can register with the French society for a one-time fee of 100 euros and be paid when their music is used abroad. For use inside Suriname, she said, that is not currently possible, because the country has no national copyright authority to collect from. Suriname Herald reporter Ryaen La Rose framed the missing authority as the biggest brake on the industry.
She also described Suriname as sitting in a position of serious copyright infringement. Broadcasters are obliged to pay for the music they use. In practice they use it without agreements with the makers.
A ruling that cannot be signed
Suriname still runs on the Auteurswet 1913, published by De Nationale Assemblée. The version that matters is the 2015 amendment, which removed the foundation structure that Stichting Auteursrechten Suriname (SASUR) had used since 2005 to license broadcasters.
SASUR took that amendment to the Constitutional Court in February 2024, arguing it breached the constitution and Suriname’s treaty obligations. In May 2025, de Ware Tijd reporter Ivan Cairo revealed why nothing had come back: the court had already drafted a ruling, but could not publish it because it had no secretary, and the law requires both the chair and the secretary to sign.
SASUR then filed emergency proceedings against the court, the State and three ministries, demanding a decision before 7 May 2025, the day six of the court’s members reached the end of their terms. Fifteen months on, there is still no publicly known ruling.
The law hands the job to the sector, not the state
The 2015 amendment does provide for a copyright bureau where makers register works and have their rights represented, subject to registration at the Bureau Intellectueel Eigendom. The detail that keeps tripping people up is that the bureau is meant to come from private initiative, not from government.
Bondru Entertainment Suriname told Times of Suriname that knowledge of music rights among event organisers is limited and fragmented, and that many still assume licensing is a government job when it is a private-law matter.
A CMO, meaning collective management organisation, licenses bars, radio and events on behalf of songwriters and performers. Suriname has the legal slot for one and nobody standing in it.
The consequence is an export problem
A de Ware Tijd editorial in March 2025 spelled out the damage in commercial terms. Because there is almost nothing to earn from music rights domestically, professional bands increasingly release new music from the Netherlands, French Guiana, Paris and sometimes Belgium.
The audience is not the constraint. DataReportal’s Digital 2026 report counts roughly 503,000 internet users in Suriname at the end of 2025, at 78.4 percent penetration. What is missing is a domestic rail to convert that into money for the people who made the music.
The recording ceiling is low too. No artist on Soundcharts’ Suriname ranking clears 150,000 Spotify monthly listeners. The top of the list sits near 142,000.
What a Surinamese artist should do this quarter
- Separate the two rails. Recording royalties reach you through a distributor and the DSPs. Publishing and performance royalties need a society. The domestic gap blocks only the second one.
- Register the compositions somewhere real. SACEM at 100 euros is one route, and a Dutch affiliation matters if your co-writers sit in the Netherlands.
- Fix metadata before release. ISRC, meaning International Standard Recording Code, plus writer splits filed at delivery, not after a track breaks.
- Log the diaspora. Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Cayenne and Paris show up in listener data long before they show up in a booking calendar.
This is the part a distributor can fix while Paramaribo waits on a signature. Delivery to global and regional DSPs, transparent per-collaborator splits in the artist reporting dashboard, and clean rights metadata do not depend on whether a Surinamese CMO exists in 2027.
The domestic licensing question is political. The export income is available now. For neighbouring cases, see our reporting on Guyana’s 1956 copyright act, Haiti’s collective management rebuild and Papua New Guinea’s missing royalty society.
