On 17 April 2026 the Battle of the Drums Secretariat launched Hamalali Wanigu, a nine-track album of original Garifuna songs, at the Bliss Centre for the Performing Arts in Belize City and pushed it to more than twenty streaming platforms. For most of those recordings, it was the first time they had a distributor at all.
The nine tracks were pulled from Battle of the Drums’ own song competitions, held annually in southern Belize since 2017. The title translates as “Voices of Our People.”
A song competition became a catalogue
Darius Avila, president of Battle of the Drums, told Greater Belize Media that the initiative gives artists a formal introduction to the music industry, protects their intellectual property, and generates revenue from their original compositions. That is a distribution thesis, not a heritage one.
The launch doubled as an awards night. Living musicians were recognised on stage, with posthumous honours for Andy Palacio, Paul Nabor and Aurelio Martínez presented to their beneficiaries. Pen Cayetano, Chico Ramos and Adrian “the Doc” Martinez performed.
PGTV Belize framed the release as part of a decade-long preservation effort across southern Belize and the Gulf of Honduras.
Belize’s best-known music was licensed out of the country
The reference point is Wátina, the 2007 Andy Palacio and The Garifuna Collective album recorded for Ivan Duran’s Stonetree Records in Belize. It reached the world through Cumbancha in Vermont, released under exclusive licence from Stonetree, and won Palacio and the label a WOMEX award.
The other reference point is Moses “Shyne” Barrow. The Caribbean Music Awards named him its 2026 Global Ambassador Honoree, Breaking Belize News reported on 14 August, citing both his recording career and his service as Leader of the Opposition in Belize’s House of Representatives.
That ceremony runs 19 September at the National Academy for the Performing Arts in Port of Spain, the first time the awards have left New York, per Caribbean Life. Shyne’s catalogue, though, was made in New York on Bad Boy.
Two different eras, one pattern: Belizean music exports through somebody else’s rights infrastructure.
Who actually collects in Belize
A collective management organisation, or CMO, is the body that licenses public performance of music inside a territory and distributes what it collects to writers and performers.
Belize’s is BSCAP, the Belizean Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, a member of the Association of Caribbean Copyright Societies. Its own site says it licenses live performance, terrestrial radio, TV and cable broadcast, streaming and physical reproduction, and lists agreements with Spotify, Apple Music and Meta. Copyright itself sits under the Copyright Act, Chapter 252, administered through the Belize Intellectual Property Office.
Here is the part artists get wrong. BSCAP handles the writer and performer side. The per-stream money on the master recording does not come through a CMO at all. It comes through a distributor. Two separate pipes, two separate registrations.
What this means for a Belizean or Garifuna artist in 2026
- Register with BSCAP for the writing and performing side. It is not a substitute for distribution, and joining one does not deliver you to DSPs.
- Get an ISRC on every master before a compilation ships. ISRC means International Standard Recording Code, the per-track identifier DSPs use to match a stream to a payee.
- Nine artists on one album is a splits problem. Per-track splits need to be agreed in writing before delivery, not renegotiated after the first statement lands.
- Keep artist-name spelling identical across every release. Inconsistent Garifuna-language metadata fragments a catalogue across duplicate DSP profiles.
- Watch territory reporting, not global totals. The Garifuna audience sits in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Honduras and Guatemala as much as in Dangriga.
A nine-song album on twenty platforms is a genuine start for a market this size. Whether it pays out depends almost entirely on work done before delivery, which is the unglamorous half of distribution that InterSpace Distribution spends most of its time on.
Related reading: Trinidad and Tobago raised every music copyright to 70 years, the Dominican Republic’s single window for music rights, and why dancehall’s money lives in the diaspora.
