Colombia’s authors’ society SAYCO collected 243,868 million pesos in 2025, roughly 79 million US dollars, the largest single year in its 80-year history. That money is distributed to 9,966 registered authors, composers, publishers and heirs.
In the same year, music from Colombia generated more than 115 million dollars in Spotify royalties, over 90% of it from listeners outside the country.
Two pots of comparable size, reaching artists through completely different plumbing. Most Colombian catalogues are wired into only one.
The number that matters is 9,966
SAYCO published its 80th-anniversary figures this month via El Heraldo: 243,868 million pesos collected in 2025, 151% cumulative growth since 2021, and 604 new affiliates in the last year.
The society says it passed 82.1% of collected funds to rightsholders, which it claims is the highest ratio among the region’s major societies. Treat the comparison as SAYCO’s own; treat the throughput figure as a benchmark to hold other CMOs to. CMO means collective management organisation, the body that licenses public performance on a songwriter’s behalf.
For a country of 52 million that exports reggaeton globally, fewer than ten thousand author-side rightsholders is a small room. Registration, not popularity, is what puts you in it.
Where SAYCO money actually comes from
Almost none of it is streaming. These are public-communication collections: radio, television retransmission, venues, events, cinema, and background music in shops and passenger transport.
Its legal docket makes the sources unusually visible: a judgment against DIRECTV Colombia ordering more than 15,000 million pesos for retransmission infringement between 2021 and 2024, a claim against cinema chains Cine Colombia, Cinemark, Cinepolis, Procinal and Royal Films seeking 96,500 million pesos, and over 1,234 million pesos in proceedings against promoters, municipalities and unlicensed individual collectors.
That is the shape of the pot. It rewards works that are documented, cue-sheeted and correctly split, not works that trend.
Three pipelines, one song
A Colombian release earns through three separate channels, and each needs its own registration:
- Recording royalties from DSPs, collected by your distributor. This is where the 115 million dollars sits, per Music Ally and Colombia One.
- Author public-performance rights, collected by SAYCO. Requires affiliation plus per-work registration with exact writer and publisher splits.
- Neighbouring rights, collected by ACINPRO for performers and phonogram producers. Neighbouring rights are the performer and label side of a broadcast payment, legally separate from the songwriter’s share.
SAYCO and ACINPRO invoice through one joint window, the Organizacion Sayco Acinpro, so a bar pays once. The bill is joint; the memberships are not. The Dominican Republic runs a comparable single window, with the same split-side friction.
What the Ley de la Musica changes
Congress approved the Ley de la Musica in its fourth debate on 2 June 2026 and sent it to presidential sanction. Per the Ministry of Cultures, it creates a music fund modelled on Colombia’s film development fund, exempts instruments and production software from VAT, and reserves at least 40% of participation at publicly funded festivals for emerging artists and women musicians.
The fund is a grant rail, not a royalty rail, and it will not fix an unregistered work. But a 40% festival quota is live-performance income, and live performance is exactly what feeds the SAYCO side of the ledger.
What to do this quarter
Register the work, not just the recording
Your distributor delivers an ISRC. It does not file an ISWC. ISWC means International Standard Musical Work Code, the identifier tying a composition to its writers across societies. Without it, foreign performance money coming back through reciprocal agreements has nothing to match against.
Register both sides
Affiliating with SAYCO covers the writers. It does nothing for the performer and producer share, which sits with ACINPRO. If you own masters, that is a second application.
Reconcile against statements you can read
Society statements arrive late and in aggregate. Line-level DSP reporting by territory, which InterSpace Distribution exposes per release in its royalty dashboard, is the only way to tell whether a track that plainly aired in Colombia is missing from a Colombian payout run. Argentina shows what happens when nobody checks: the monopoly ended and the registry stayed the same.
The 82.1% figure is only good news if you are one of the 9,966.
