Algeria’s national copyright office keeps 30 percent of every dinar it collects before a single author, performer or producer gets paid. The split, documented by Yacine Idjer for Music In Africa, gives 30 percent to authors and composers, 25 percent to producers and 15 percent to performers. The final 30 percent stays with the Office National des Droits d’Auteur et des Droits Voisins to fund creation and heritage work.
That retention is not a scandal. It is policy, written for a market that has largely stopped existing.
Half the collection comes from hardware, not from plays
ONDA is a CMO. CMO means collective management organisation: the body that licenses music on behalf of rights holders and divides the proceeds.
Music In Africa puts roughly half of ONDA’s total receipts in one bucket: the private copy levy, a fee charged on blank media, hard drives, flash drives and downloadable software imported into the country. The mechanics matter more than the headline:
- It is charged at the point of import, not at the point of listening.
- It carries no usage data, so nobody knows which songs the levy is compensating.
- Distribution therefore runs on proxies such as broadcast logs, not on plays.
- An artist with a big streaming audience and no radio rotation is nearly invisible to it.
The same piece estimates Algerian piracy at 60 to 70 percent, the environment the levy was built to offset.
What ONDA actually does well
Broadcast collection. On 28 April 2026, ONDA handed Algerian Radio its “Copyright Friendly” label, as Algerian Radio reported. The broadcaster airs roughly 700,000 musical works a year.
ONDA deputy director general Mehdi Delmi credited the broadcaster for staying close to Algerian creators “not only through broadcasting but through legal broadcasting.”
L’Expression reported a payout of more than 408 million dinars to authors, rights holders and music publishers. CISAC’s 2017 report put all of Africa at 67 million euros of collections in 2016, with Algeria alone accounting for 23 million euros of it.
So Algeria is not a weak collector by African standards. It is a strong collector on the wrong revenue base. Neighbouring Morocco hit the same wall when it rewrote its copyright law and found most of a Moroccan rapper’s income had never passed through the national office.
The money that is growing arrives on a different rail
Spotify’s Middle East and Africa government affairs director Imad Mesdoua told WIPO Magazine in May 2025 that MENA is the world’s fastest-growing music region, with revenues up 22.8 percent in 2024 and streaming at 99.5 percent of the market.
None of that reaches an Algerian rights holder through ONDA, which covers broadcast, public performance and the levy. Recording royalties from Spotify, Anghami, Deezer and Apple Music travel through the distributor’s pipeline instead. ONDA’s most-cited digital arrangement remains its long-standing protocol with YouTube. Tunisia is trying to solve the same gap from the tax side, having ordered its internet providers to fund music royalties without yet setting a rate.
DDEX means Digital Data Exchange, the metadata standard DSPs use to identify a recording and route its payment. If a release goes out without clean DDEX metadata and correct ISRCs, no national office can fix the shortfall afterwards.
What an Algerian rights holder should do about it
- Register works with ONDA anyway. Radio rotation across 700,000 broadcast works a year is money nobody else will claim for you.
- Separate the two income streams: ONDA covers authors’ and neighbouring rights, your distributor covers DSP recording royalties.
- Match the ISRC and UPC on your DSP releases to the titles declared at ONDA, or one song exists twice with no link between them.
- Treat Anghami, Deezer and YouTube Music as core Algerian delivery targets, not optional extras.
- Track where the listeners are. Raï and Algerian rap draw heavy diaspora play in France and Canada, licensed there by different societies than plays inside Algeria.
That last point is why distribution choice matters in North Africa. InterSpace Distribution delivers to the regional DSPs a majors-focused pipeline tends to skip, and reports per territory, so a rights holder can see which country the money came from before deciding where to register.
Algeria built one of Africa’s earliest collection systems. The task now is pointing it at streams instead of storage media.
