Mali music royalties are distributed under a rulebook that strips 35 percent off the top before a single author is paid, and that rulebook was signed in Bamako on 30 October 1982.
It is still the operative text. OAPI, the regional industrial property body, publishes the arrete setting collection and distribution for the Bureau malien du droit d’auteur (BUMDA), Mali’s collective management organisation, in that form.
The deduction stack, in order
The regulation’s opening clause sets the sequence. Royalties reach rightsholders only after three subtractions: 15 percent for general costs, 15 percent withheld for IAS, and 5 percent for the social fund.
That is 35 FCFA of every 100 collected, gone before any split key applies.
Article 13 adds a second layer. The authors’ social fund is also fed by a 10 percent retention taken from every royalty payment made to each author.
Run both rules in sequence and roughly 58.5 FCFA of each 100 collected reaches a named rightsholder. The regulation has the force of law for members.
The 1982 keys decide what you compete for
Radio money is carved up by category before any title is scored. Article 8 allocates 35 percent to dramatic works, 30 percent to musical works with or without words, 20 percent to literary works and 15 percent to the recording right.
A song competes for 30 percent of the radio pool, not for the pool.
Article 9 inverts that for the recording class: 70 percent musical, 15 percent dramatic, 15 percent literary. Public-domain and folklore income never reaches an individual at all, because Article 13 routes it to the social fund and to cultural promotion.
Article 53 matters to exporters: foreign royalties are distributed on BUMDA’s keys unless the reciprocal agreement hands that job to the foreign society.
Your entry in the programme log is your only claim
BUMDA does not pay from a catalogue database. It pays from the programme returns that users file.
Article 4 bis requires those returns daily, naming every work performed with its authors-composers, arrangers and publishers. Article 4 lets BUMDA reject a return it finds false or illegible, and complete titles naming no author “as far as possible” from its own file.
“As far as possible” is where money stops moving. In a report dated 18 August 2026 covering 2022 to 30 September 2025, Mali’s Verificateur general found board-approved distribution proposals that did not match the regulatory criteria, and royalties booked to a line called “repertoire BUMDA” for artists who could not be identified from the telephone operators’ programme logs, per Bamada.net on 7 September 2026.
That, the auditor warned, can reduce what is owed to rightsholders whose works were actually used. Financial irregularities came to 3,600,000 FCFA and were regularised after the audit.
Collections landed 32 percent short, and the payers are mobile operators
BUMDA recovered 573,542,862 FCFA in 2025 against a forecast of 841,461,464 FCFA, an execution rate of 68.16 percent, per Mali Tribune’s report of the 6 March board session. About 874,000 euros at the CFA franc’s fixed peg of 655.957.
The neighbouring-rights distribution that board reviewed covered the 2023 and 2024 financial years, funded chiefly by Orange Mali SA and Moov Africa Malitel. Telecoms money, two to three years in arrears.
Ordinance No. 2026-015/PT-RM of 10 April 2026 rewrote the law above this machinery. The auditor still had to ask the Ministry of Culture to adopt the text explaining how private copy remuneration, a levy on devices and blank media, is collected.
What a Malian release should do with this
Treat BUMDA as the performance and private copy line, not the streaming line. Nothing in the 1982 regulation addresses on-demand streaming, and the board was still being urged in March 2026 to computerise rights tracking.
Declare every work with full author, composer, arranger and publisher credits, because the programme return is the only place your claim exists. The same discipline decides outcomes in Burkina Faso, where 508 million CFA sat unclaimed, and Benin, where collection runs over USSD.
Then run the digital side directly, on per-track ISRC reporting. ISRC means International Standard Recording Code, the identifier for each master, and it is what lets you reconcile a payout rather than reconstruct one from a broadcaster’s log. Togo paid 722 authors in August, none by mobile money, the same gap seen from the payout rail.
