On 30 October 2026, Vietnam’s music copyright society VCPMC said its revenue for the first nine months of 2026 rose 24% from the same period in 2025. That is a meaningful collections signal, but it is not a 24% increase in what songwriters received. The Vietnam Center for Protection of Music Copyright (VCPMC) announced the figure on 30 October without publishing a nine-month collection total, a payout total or a breakdown by use. Anyone pricing a Vietnamese catalogue, forecasting a writer’s income or promising an artist a return from the market should keep those three missing figures in view.
The distinction matters because VCPMC collects money at one end of a chain and pays rights owners at another. Its 30 October statement describes stronger collection and licensing activity, but it does not say which services or venues supplied the increase, what share was matched to works, or when the resulting money was paid. The headline therefore tells us that more money entered the society’s system. It does not tell us which repertoire benefited.
What the new number measures
VCPMC presented the 24% comparison at the Asia-Pacific committee meeting of the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC), held on 29 October 2026. In its 30 October account, the society calls the measure total revenue for the first nine months of the year. It links the result to licensing, collections and distribution work, but gives no amount in Vietnamese dong and no category table. The comparison is like for like in calendar period, which makes the growth figure useful. The absence of a cash total and category detail limits what it can explain.
The nearest fuller benchmark is VCPMC’s account of its 2025 year-end meeting, published in January 2026. In that January 2026 account, the society reported that it collected more than VND424 billion (about US$16.3 million) during 2025, up 8% from 2024, and paid more than VND268 billion (about US$10.3 million) to rights owners, up 5%. The dollar illustrations use Vietcombank’s 30 October 2026 selling rate of VND25,990 per US dollar, as recorded by VnMarketData; they are not the exchange rate at which the 2025 money moved. The 2025 collection and payment totals are separate flows. Dividing one by the other would not yield a defensible commission or writer share because payments can relate to money collected in different periods.
In its January 2026 account, VCPMC says it processes four distributions each year and pays writers and other copyright owners in the first month of the following quarter, after finishing each quarter’s distribution data. That schedule provides a useful question for a member: which usage period does a payment cover? A collection growth announcement alone cannot answer it. A writer may see a later payment, or a different figure from the collection trend, without either observation contradicting the new headline.
Digital is central, but the dates must stay attached
CISAC’s Global Collections Report 2025 puts digital at 89.6% of Vietnam’s creator royalty collections in 2024. The same report gives digital shares of 82.5% for Indonesia, 80.9% for the Philippines and 69.1% for Thailand in that year. Those are creator collections, not recorded-music sales or the share of every artist’s personal income. They are also 2024 figures. They establish how strongly digital shaped the earlier rights landscape, but they cannot identify the source of VCPMC’s 2026 increase.
That gap is important for distributors entering Vietnam. Delivery of a recording to a streaming service concerns the sound recording and its commercial account. A composition also has writers, publishers and mandates that need to be identifiable to the society handling those rights. VCPMC’s own member guidance says distributions depend on usage data, the type of exploitation, money actually collected and each work’s rights shares. It also says joining VCPMC is a mandate for rights management, distinct from a copyright registration certificate. For a catalogue manager, the practical task is to know who controls the composition, who has given a mandate and whether the work and shares can be matched to usage. A streaming dashboard for the recording does not settle those questions.
Nor should the 89.6% digital share be projected mechanically onto the new nine-month growth rate. VCPMC’s 30 October release does not split 2026 receipts between digital services, broadcast, live performance and background music. If a distributor wants to tell writers that streaming drove the jump, it needs a current category statement from the society. Without one, that sentence would be a guess.
The venue side may be moving too
There is evidence that Vietnam’s public-use licensing environment changed during the period, though not enough to assign a share of the 24% rise to it. In an August 2026 report, VnExpress described cafés adjusting to music licensing charges introduced in July. VnExpress quoted VCPMC in August 2026 as saying that voluntary registrations by restaurant and café owners had risen about 150% from a year earlier. That is a claim about registrations, reported by VnExpress in August, not a published breakdown of money collected from those venues. A higher count of registered users may widen the licensing base, but it cannot be converted into a royalty total from the information available.
The same VnExpress report showed why this is a market-operation issue rather than a simple growth story: some proprietors said they had stopped playing music or changed what they played, while others said they had budgeted for licensing. For writers, a licensed venue is only the beginning of the money trail. The society still needs usable information about repertoire and ownership to distribute receipts accurately. VCPMC’s member guidance explicitly lists usage data and rights shares among the inputs to distribution. A café’s decision to pay therefore does not identify the songwriters who will receive the payment, or the date they will see it.
The questions a rights owner should ask
For a Vietnamese songwriter, or a publisher in Lagos managing a composition that travels into Vietnam, the most useful follow-up to the 24% headline is a statement of the work’s route through the system. Is the composition registered with the organisation that represents the writer in Vietnam, directly or through an affiliate? Are the writer and publisher shares recorded consistently? Which usage period, service or licence class appears on the statement? And, if a use is visible elsewhere but absent from the society statement, what matching information can the rights owner supply? These are questions prompted by VCPMC’s stated distribution inputs, not claims that any particular payment has gone missing.
The society could make the new growth figure more useful by publishing a nine-month cash total, collections by use, payments by period and a clear account of how unmatched money is treated. None appears in its 30 October release. That is a limitation of the public announcement, not evidence of a failure to distribute. The previous annual report shows VCPMC can publish both collected and paid amounts, so the missing nine-month payout figure should remain a question rather than be filled with an estimate.
Vietnam’s 24% increase deserves attention because it comes from the collecting society itself, rather than a chart or a platform’s publicity. Its commercial meaning is narrower than the headline may suggest. It shows stronger society revenue over a stated period. Until the corresponding source and payout tables are available, it cannot tell a distributor which rights stream grew, or tell a writer how much more reached their account.
