OSA, the Czech songwriters’ collecting society, took in CZK 302 million from streaming services in 2025, up 28 percent, according to its 2 June 2026 results. Whether any of that reaches a self-releasing writer outside Prague depends on three clauses in its distribution rules.
CMO means collective management organisation. OSA licenses the composition, not the master: your distributor collects for the recording, while the publishing share of a Czech stream runs through OSA.
What the 2025 numbers say
- Total licence income: CZK 1.66 billion, up CZK 128 million year on year.
- Streaming: CZK 302 million, up 28 percent, about 12.4 million euros at the ECB rate of 11 September 2026.
- Live concerts: CZK 267 million, up 27 percent. Broadcasting remains the largest line at CZK 668 million.
- Overhead: 11.98 percent, so 88 of every 100 koruna reaches rightsholders, OSA told its 25 May 2026 general assembly.
- Czech music abroad: CZK 76 million, down 7 percent, which OSA blames mainly on the strong koruna.
Most of the money leaves the country
OSA’s 2025 yearbook shows CZK 351.3 million distributed to foreign societies across 98 countries. The US took 36.81 percent and the UK 20.59 percent.
Rightsholders credited split 209,363 foreign to 10,010 domestic. The count excludes anyone with no OSA contract, registration or foreign society, so an unregistered writer is not even in the table.
The rules also say a writer signed to a foreign society is paid in Czechia only exceptionally. Your Czech publishing money arrives through your home society, or not at all.
Three rules that decide whether a Czech stream pays you
These come from OSA’s distribution rules (Rozúčtovací řád), as adopted on 26 May 2025.
1. The 10,000 koruna line
Under a blanket licence, clause 5.8.3.1 pays streaming royalties song by song only when the service pays at least CZK 10,000 a month (about 412 euros), or CZK 5,000 for interactive radio.
Below that line, or where a service sends no usage report, clause 5.8.3.3 moves the money into a pool shared out by each writer’s radio, TV and live earnings from the previous year. A stream on a small platform pays writers with airplay, not necessarily the writer who was streamed.
2. The 25/75 split
Once a streaming royalty is matched to a song, 25 percent follows the mechanical shares and 75 percent the performance shares (clause 5.8.3.2). Downloads run the other way, 75/25. Leave one set of shares blank or inconsistent and that portion is at risk.
3. The three-year clock
Under Article 12, a song a service reports but that is missing from OSA’s database, directly or through the international database, is “unidentified” at distribution.
- That money is held separately for three years from the end of the year it was collected.
- It is paid quarterly as songs are identified.
- Whatever is still unclaimed then goes to OSA’s cultural, social and educational fund.
Money collected in 2025 for an unidentified song stays claimable until 31 December 2028. It is the same unclaimed-money problem we traced in Mauritius’s July distribution, with a longer fuse.
What to do with your catalogue
- Register every song before release with your home society, with an ISWC (International Standard Musical Work Code, the identifier for a composition) and complete writer and publisher splits. That is how a work reaches the international database OSA checks.
- Match your metadata. The title and writer credits your distributor delivers with the ISRC (International Standard Recording Code, the identifier for a master) should mirror the work registration, because usage reports are matched against it.
- Know the cadence. OSA pays online royalties monthly once it has been paid and has the usage report, with a CZK 500 minimum payout. Across all 219,373 payees, the average 2025 distribution was CZK 5,308.
- Czech writers: Germany, Slovakia and Austria supply two-thirds of OSA’s income from abroad, and a strong koruna shrinks it.
Timing matters as much as registration, as the Swiss SUISA lag and Singapore’s COMPASS threshold show. At InterSpace Distribution, writer credits travel alongside the ISRC in our DDEX (Digital Data Exchange, the industry delivery standard) feeds, but no distributor can collect the publishing share for you. Only a society registration can.
