Maldives music royalties are collected without a collecting society, because the country’s copyright act never built one. Section 27 of the Copyrights and Related Rights Act 23/2010 says that when a commercially published sound recording is broadcast, communicated to the public or publicly performed, “a single equitable remuneration for the performer or performers and the producer of the sound recording shall be paid by the user to the producer.”
Paid by the user. To the producer. Not to a society, and not through a blanket licence.
The one time the act mentions collective management
Search the English text of the act, hosted by the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade, and the phrase “collective administration organization” appears exactly once, inside a library exception. It is not a chapter, and it is not a mandate.
The US International Trade Administration’s Maldives IP guide, updated 4 March 2026, confirms the gap in a single line: a draft regulation on collective management organisations has been prepared and is currently under review.
Until that regulation lands there is no Maldivian PRO. PRO means performing rights organisation, the body that licenses venues and broadcasters and splits the proceeds among writers and publishers. The Maldives has the right written into statute and no plumbing underneath it. Laos sat in the same position across the ASEAN collective management survey.
The licensing pot is 182 resorts
That absence matters more here than in most markets of half a million people. Maldivian public performance is unusually concentrated and unusually well funded.
- 182 registered tourist resorts and 941 guesthouses as of 26 November 2025, per the Ministry of Tourism and Environment, reported by Maldives Financial Review.
- 67,361 registered beds, with 98.6 percent in operation.
- 2.25 million arrivals in 2025, up 9.8 percent year on year, roughly 1.6 million of them staying in resorts, according to Hotelier Maldives on 3 January 2026.
Every one of those properties plays music in a lobby, a pool bar and a restaurant, and most run a live circuit that is the real employer of Maldivian musicians. The Musicians’ Union of Maldives was founded on 20 July 2020 because resorts closed during the pandemic and the income stopped. The gigs, not the royalties.
What Section 27 means for a label
Read literally, 27(a) makes the venue the payer and the producer the payee. 27(b) then adds that unless the parties agree otherwise, the producer passes half of that sum to the performers.
That is a direct licensing regime by default, and it has three practical consequences.
- Your producer entity is the collection point. If the producer of record on a recording is a label you have since left, the resort money is legally theirs to receive.
- The performer’s 50 percent is a default, not a floor. “Unless otherwise agreed” is a contract term you set in the split sheet, not a rate handed to you.
- There is no unclaimed pool. With no society running distributions, uncollected Maldivian use is not sitting somewhere accruing. It simply never existed as revenue.
Related rights run 50 years from publication, or from fixation if unpublished. Author’s rights run life plus 50. Compare the Philippines, where a Cebu retail store pays a published daily tariff. The difference is not the money. It is whether anyone holds the invoice book.
Berne changed the export side, not the collection side
Maldivian membership of the Berne Convention took effect on 22 November 2025. The Maldives Intellectual Property Office Act was ratified on 21 August 2025 and came into force on 1 January 2026, per the President’s Office.
Neither collects anything. Berne makes a Dhivehi song enforceable across its membership; it does not create a counterpart society to route foreign performance income home, which is the same trap Nepali artists hit from the other direction.
Which leaves distribution as the only functioning royalty rail in the country. Spotify lists the Maldives among its available Asian markets, and DataReportal’s Digital 2026 report puts internet penetration at 84.7 percent, with 449,000 users at the end of 2025.
Recording revenue arrives through a distributor, automatically. Public performance revenue arrives by invoice, and only if somebody sends one.
