Paraguay funds a large share of its music royalties with a 0.5 percent levy charged at customs on imported phones, hard drives and memory cards, not with streaming income. The rate is set by presidential decree, and in 2024 it was cut in half to make electronics cheaper for shopping tourists.
Money reaching a Paraguayan songwriter through the collective system is largely hardware money, and it moves when trade policy moves.
What the levy is
Chapter IV of Ley 1328/98, Paraguay’s copyright and related rights law, creates a compensation right for private copying. Decreto 4145/2025 now regulates it, replacing Decreto 4212/2015.
DINAPI means Dirección Nacional de Propiedad Intelectual, Paraguay’s national intellectual property office. It administers RISMÓMPP, the register importers and manufacturers of recording and playback equipment must join.
The charge is 0.5 percent of import value, or of the value of the first domestic sale for goods made in Paraguay. Vouga Abogados set out the mechanics when the decree landed in July 2025.
Diario HOY reported in February 2024 that the levy was raising roughly 12 million dollars a year at customs.
The 2024 cut, and what it tells you
Decreto 2063, signed on 9 July 2024, halved the private copying tariff in its article 12. The stated purpose was to incentivise shopping tourism for buyers without a Paraguayan domicile, as Última Hora reported at the time.
The societies said the scheme covers more than 8,000 titleholders. Every one of them took the cut without a vote.
A year later the government reversed. Decreto 4145/2025 restored the full rate and dropped DINAPI’s own share of net collections from 20 percent to 10 percent.
Plan for that volatility. An income line set by executive decree, on an instrument that doubles as a trade lever, can be halved between quarters.
Where the money actually goes
- 10 percent of the net goes to DINAPI, earmarked for intellectual property promotion and enforcement. It was 20 percent until July 2025.
- Administrative costs are capped at 15 percent of total collected.
- AIE Paraguay is the single collecting entity. It does not keep the pot, it distributes it.
- The remainder is divided among the authorised music societies by agreement among them, not by play counts or audience data.
That catches people out. No usage log decides how the pot splits between authors, performers and master owners.
Inter Artis Paraguay, the audiovisual performers’ body, has argued since February 2024 that it receives nothing from a fund the law includes it in. Its lawyer Carlos Rojas Ortellado told Diario HOY that the money all goes to music, and pointed to an 886 million guaraní gap between AIE’s reporting and DINAPI’s.
Three roles, three memberships
If you self-release in Paraguay you occupy three legal positions at once, and each has a different door.
- Author and composer: APA, Autores Paraguayos Asociados.
- Performer: AIE Paraguay.
- Phonogram producer, meaning whoever owns the master: SGP.
Join none and the pot divides without you in it. Join only APA and your performer and master shares stay in the pool.
APA’s member FAQ describes distribution built on planillas de ejecución, performance sheets filed by artistic directors and inspectors, plus electronic monitoring of radio and television. Live shows pay authors 10 percent of ticket revenue, 15 percent for a premiere.
The pattern is regional. Argentina opened its royalty monopoly and produced a registry of incumbents, Bolivia audited its society and found performers knocking on the wrong door, Ecuador distributed 6.6 million dollars and its own members took 878,000.
None of this is your streaming money
Nothing in the private copying system touches Spotify, YouTube or Apple Music revenue. That income reaches you through your distributor and never passes through DINAPI.
So a Paraguayan act has two pipelines and most watch only one. Get masters delivered and reporting cleanly first, that is the pipeline you control, then register with APA, AIE and SGP for money you cannot invoice for yourself.
A distributor reporting by territory will show what Paraguay is worth on streams, the same way it shows what a guarania record earns outside Asunción. Nobody can show what the customs levy owes you until you join the society holding your share.
