Benin music royalties are now collectible by mobile money: the bars, broadcasters and shops that owe them can pay BUBEDRA through a USSD menu running on MTN, MOOV and SBIN. Getting your own name onto the register that receives that money still requires a trip to Cotonou.
That gap is the story of collective licensing in Benin in 2026, and it repeats across francophone West Africa.
The collection side is now a phone menu
BUBEDRA is the Bureau Béninois du Droit d’Auteur et des Droits Voisins, Benin’s CMO. CMO means collective management organisation: the body that licenses public performance and reproduction of music locally and splits the proceeds among registered rights holders.
Its digitisation programme sits inside the government’s PAG 2021-2026 action plan and is documented on UNESCO’s Policy Monitoring Platform. It has four parts: a web and Android collection platform, a payment-tracking interface, a centralised database of payers with GPS location, and a USSD menu across the three mobile operators. USSD means Unstructured Supplementary Service Data, the numeric menu that works on any handset without a data connection.
Read that list again from the money’s point of view. Every element is about finding and billing users. None of it is about finding rights holders.
The register still runs on travel
A 14 July 2026 report by Bérénice Célia Gainsi for SpartiCulture found that BUBEDRA membership now appears on Benin’s national public services portal, but only as an information sheet. To join, a creator must still appear in person at the Cotonou offices to file the dossier.
For musicians in Parakou, Natitingou, Djougou, Lokossa or Porto-Novo, that is travel and expense incurred before a single franc has been collected on their behalf.
The membership statistics BUBEDRA itself reported to UNESCO show what the friction costs. In the music category the figure fell from 149 in 2020 to 123 in 2021, 115 in 2022 and 113 in 2023.
The payout rail, when it runs, is not the problem. The last publicly detailed payment round, reported by Wilfried Agninnin for Daabaaru, paid by bank details or mobile money, and covered public performance for the second half of 2019 plus mechanical reproduction for all of 2019. The beneficiary list was posted at headquarters in Cotonou.
A new board, appointed entirely from the state
Decree 2026-033 of 18 February 2026 rewrote Article 10 of BUBEDRA’s statutes. Decree 2026-279 of 22 April then named seven administrators on three-year renewable terms, replacing the governance framework set in July 2022, as reported by La Marina BJ.
All seven seats are state seats: the presidency plus the ministries of culture, commerce, finance, digitalisation, justice and interior. Coovi Prudence Léonce Dahodekou of the culture ministry chairs.
Enforcement is still being negotiated rather than exercised. In March 2025 director general Eugène Cocou Aballo asked broadcast regulator HAAC to make media outlets that use works without paying comply. HAAC president Edouard Loko promised measures would be taken.
What this changes for a Beninese release
Treat the society and your distributor as two separate pipes
Local performance and reproduction income flows through BUBEDRA. Streaming income does not. It reaches you from the DSPs through whoever delivers your releases. DSP means digital service provider. Joining the society puts no Boomplay, Audiomack, Spotify or YouTube money in your account, and no distributor collects your local performance income for you.
Keep a live payout instrument on file
The society pays to bank details or a mobile money number. If yours is stale or was never filed, your entitlement waits on a list in Cotonou rather than arriving on the rail that already works.
Register works, not just yourself
Identification commissions match reported usage to works. Without accurate titles and splits lodged locally and in your delivery metadata, a well-built collection system finds nobody to pay.
The half an artist controls is distribution. InterSpace Distribution delivers DDEX-native into Boomplay and Audiomack alongside the global platforms and reports contributor splits in the artist dashboard, so the streaming side of a Beninese catalogue stays legible while the local side waits on a decree. DDEX means Digital Data Exchange, the metadata standard DSPs ingest.
Related reading: Mobile Money, Data Caps and the African Rights Stack, Burkina Faso’s 508 Million CFA Nobody Collected, and Côte d’Ivoire’s Shrinking Copyright Payout.
