The Bahamas passed a Copyright Act in July 2024 that its own acting prime minister said would let Bahamian musicians collect royalties for the first time, and as of the most recent US government assessment in April 2026 that Act is still not in force.
What Parliament actually passed
On 18 July 2024 the House of Assembly debated a compendium of intellectual property bills covering patents, copyright and trademarks. The Tribune reported acting Prime Minister Chester Cooper telling the House that writers, artists, musicians and producers would be able to receive royalties from users of their intellectual property for the first time.
Cooper called the existing framework non-compliant with the CARIFORUM-EU Economic Partnership Agreement and WTO guidelines. The day before, the Minister for Grand Bahama backed the bill in the same chamber, listing music artists, producers, songwriters and DJs among the “orange economy” workers it was meant to serve, per ZNS Bahamas.
The two-year gap
The US Department of Commerce country commercial guide for the Bahamas, last published on 6 April 2026, states plainly that the 2024 Trademarks, Patents and Copyright Acts are not yet in force, because subsidiary regulations, fees and procedures remain under development.
That matters more for music than for trademarks. The Act creates a Copyright Royalty Tribunal whose job is collecting and distributing royalties. A tribunal that has not commenced cannot set a rate, hear a dispute, or move money.
The government did sign five WIPO treaties in mid-2025: Budapest, Nice, Vienna, the Trademark Law Treaty and the Singapore Treaty. Read the list carefully. Budapest covers deposits of microorganisms for patent procedure. The other four are trademark instruments. Not one concerns musical works or sound recordings.
What musicians did instead
On 20 January 2026 the United Artists Bahamas Union launched a Benevolent Fund Committee, reported by The Tribune. It opened with 3,000 dollars seeded from levies collected at Tricky Entertainment’s Bahamas Breeze Festival, and is open to any Bahamian musician or entertainer regardless of union membership. The union has just over 50 members.
Ongoing funding comes from levies on foreign artists working in the Bahamas plus two annual fundraisers, a gala and a Rake N’ Scrape concert. Co-chair David “Funky D” Ferguson put it bluntly: banks do not lend musicians money.
That is a hardship fund, not a royalty rail. It exists because the statutory one has not arrived.
The export precedent
Baha Men won the Grammy for Best Dance Recording on 21 February 2001 for “Who Let the Dogs Out.” It came out on S-Curve Records, a New York label Steve Greenberg founded specifically to sign the group, and the song was written by Trinidadian artist Anslem Douglas as “Doggie.”
Bahamian performance, Trinidadian composition, American label, American publishing. None of that revenue passed through a Bahamian collection system, because there was not one to pass through.
What a Bahamian artist can control this year
- Recording royalties are contractual, not statutory. Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and Audiomack pay your distributor under a licence, not under the Copyright Act. That income does not wait for commencement.
- Publishing is the exposed side. With no Bahamian collective management organisation to join, songwriters need a foreign publishing administrator or a PRO affiliation to capture performance and mechanical income at all.
- Get identifiers right. ISRC means International Standard Recording Code, the per-track identifier DSPs match payments against. A duplicated or missing ISRC is the most common reason a Caribbean release earns and never gets paid.
- Assume the audience is offshore. DataReportal’s Digital 2026 report counts 383,000 internet users in the Bahamas at 94.8 percent penetration. That home market is one mid-sized city. The listeners are in Florida, New York, Toronto and London.
- Document splits at the distributor. With no tribunal to arbitrate, a written split registered before release is the only version of the truth.
DDEX means Digital Data Exchange, the metadata standard DSPs use to match a delivery to a payment. Getting that delivery clean is what decides whether a rake-and-scrape record from Cat Island earns in Miami. The Act will commence eventually. Until it does, the only Bahamian royalty rail that works is the one an artist builds through distribution.
Related: Trinidad and Tobago’s 70-year copyright term and the Dominican Republic’s single window for music rights.
