Rwanda music royalties are now governed by a 2024 intellectual property law, a royalty order approved by Cabinet in March 2026 and collective management rules published in July, and there is still no society distributing the money.
That gap is the most important fact for any Rwandan artist planning a release this year.
What Rwanda changed on paper
- Law n° 055/2024 of 20/06/2024 on the Protection of Intellectual Property hit the Official Gazette on 31 July 2024, repealing the 2009 law, as CFL Advocates set out.
- Article 301 lets government, schools and religious institutions use artistic works without the author’s consent or payment, provided the public performance is not for profit. Creators pushed back hard, as Emmanuel Gatera reported for The New Times in August 2024.
- A ministerial order on royalties was approved by Cabinet in March 2026.
- RDB CEO Jean-Guy Afrika confirmed at a 3 July 2026 Ministry of Youth and Arts roundtable that the government has published the Collective Management Organisations Ministerial Order, with the Intellectual Property Office being strengthened to operationalise it.
CMO means collective management organisation, the body that licenses radio, TV, bars and venues and pays songwriters their performance share.
Three days later, Parliament said the plumbing does not work yet. On 6 July 2026, committee chair Emma Rubagumya Furaha said “there is a need to establish effective collective management organisations or mechanisms,” warning implementation remains weak, per Charles Nyandwi in The New Times.
The hole RSAU left
The Rwanda Society of Authors was dissolved in 2025 over mismanagement. Minister of Youth and Arts Abdallah Utumatwishima told a parliamentary committee on 22 April 2025 that a replacement body would be created by law, and later said the national arts policy was expected to launch by May 2026, alongside a Rwanda Arts Council built with UNESCO.
The number that should focus everyone: RSAU distributed under Rwf 90 million, roughly 65,000 dollars, since 2017. The New Times set that beside South Africa’s SAMRO, which distributed R429 million in 2024, in its March 2026 piece on Africa’s black box problem.
Private operators have moved into the vacuum. Kigali firm Dajah Group registers Rwandan compositions across more than 120 territories, with founder Hervé Muvunyi telling the same paper that local players “were focused on the master revenue, while the underlying composition was earning money globally that was simply being lost.”
The export money is already moving
While the domestic system stalls, Rwandan writers are showing up on regional hits.
Spotify’s Global Impact List for the first half of 2026, covered by Capital FM Africa on 12 August 2026, ranked “AYAYAAH” by Joshua Baraka, Bien and Rwanda’s ELEMENT Eleéeh at number two, and “Pom Pom” by Diamond Platnumz, Bruce Melodie and Brown Joel at number four.
Both are three-country records. That means splits crossing Rwandan, Ugandan, Kenyan, Tanzanian and Nigerian writers, and revenue landing in markets whose societies do function.
What Rwandan acts should lock down this quarter
- Sign a split sheet before release, not after the song charts. Percentages, legal names, IPI numbers.
- Register compositions with a publishing administrator that can reach foreign PROs. A PRO is a performing rights organisation, the overseas counterpart to the CMO Rwanda does not yet have running.
- Get an ISWC on the composition and a clean ISRC on every master. Without both, cross-border matching fails silently.
- Insist your distributor delivers DDEX-standard metadata. DDEX means Digital Data Exchange, the messaging format that carries your credits to each store.
- Ship to Boomplay, Audiomack and YouTube Music alongside Spotify and Apple Music. East African listening is not Spotify-only.
Where this leaves independent labels
Rwanda’s CMO will eventually collect the domestic broadcast and venue money. It will never collect what a Kigali writer earns from a Lagos co-write, because that has always depended on metadata, not on Kigali.
That part a distributor controls. Accurate contributor data, multi-level splits visible in the artist’s own royalty dashboard, and delivery to the regional platforms East African audiences actually use are what turn a three-country hit into three countries’ worth of income.
Related reading: Uganda Paid Out About $58,000 in Music Royalties Last Year, Kenya’s Royalty System Spent the Year in Court, and Top Music Distribution Platforms for Rwandan Artists.
