Bolivia’s National Intellectual Property Service, SENAPI, opened two audit processes into Sobodaycom, the country’s authors’ and composers’ society, in the first days of July 2026. The trigger was a public revolt by musicians who said the society had collected for decades and paid them nothing.
Alejandro Delius of Quirquiña asked for 26 years of retroactive payments and began calling the body “Robodaycom” in public. Luis Vega said he was billed for playing his own music at his own wedding. Correo del Sur logged Viko Paredes of Alcoholika, Bonny Lovy and others in the same wave.
What SENAPI is actually auditing
Two things, per the regulator’s announced scope:
- Whether collected author and related-rights money was correctly apportioned, distributed and delivered.
- Whether the administrative and operating costs the society deducts can be justified.
SENAPI also opened a formal complaints channel and invited authors, performers and heirs to file, which is how a regulator signals it wants a paper trail rather than a news cycle.
Bolivia has four societies, not one
CMO means collective management organisation, the body that licenses public performance and broadcast use of music and pays rightsholders. SENAPI lists four authorized in Bolivia: Sobodaycom for authors and composers, ABAIEM for performers, ASBOPROFON for phonogram producers, and ESCRIBO for writers.
Sobodaycom legal director Charly Alborta told Visión 360 that artists demanding royalties on the basis of being artists are “incurring in a great error,” because performer rights sit with ABAIEM.
Legally tidy. Commercially useless if the performer side is not visibly collecting and distributing at scale. That gap, not the audit, is the structural story.
The tariff that lit the fuse
Sobodaycom prices in UDA units. eju.tv published the 2026 schedule: one UDA is Bs 110, funeral services run 1 to 3 UDA, category A parties with amplification run 6 to 30 UDA, and political events and kermeses run 4 to 60 UDA.
Invoicing a wake is a defensible legal position and a catastrophic public one. It is the detail every Bolivian outlet led with.
Where a Bolivian record actually earns
Latin America was the world’s fastest-growing region in 2025, up 17.1% in a sixteenth straight year of growth, with streaming at 88.1% of regional revenue, according to the IFPI Global Music Report 2026. Brazil is the No. 8 market, Mexico No. 10. Bolivia is nowhere on that list.
Its most lucrative export was never a home-market collection. “Llorando se fue,” recorded by Los Kjarkas in 1981, became Kaoma’s “Lambada” in 1989 without proper credit. The group litigated in France and won credits and royalties, a story Songlines traced in detail.
That is the shape of Bolivian music money. The publishing claim travels. The master-side income arrives from Spain, Argentina, the United States and Brazil, through distributor reporting, not through a La Paz cashier.
What an independent act in Santa Cruz should do this quarter
- Register twice. Compositions with Sobodaycom, performances with ABAIEM. They are separate revenue lines and neither society will chase the other’s paperwork for you.
- Lock writer and performer splits at delivery, not after a song lands. Retroactive claims are exactly what the audit is now unpicking.
- Treat DSP statements as the audit trail you control. Per-territory, per-store reporting is the one ledger a Bolivian artist can actually reconcile.
- File with SENAPI if you believe you are owed. The complaints channel is open and the regulator asked for volume.
- Watch export territories before home ones. Andean and cumbia catalogue over-indexes in Argentina, Spain and the US Latin market.
Bolivia’s collection system may come out of this audit cleaner. It will still only cover the composition side of one small domestic market. The recording, and the money it makes in six other countries, is a distribution problem, and it always was.
Related reading: Ecuador’s authors’ society distributed $6.6 million and its own members got $878,000, the Dominican Republic’s single-window fight, and Panama’s chart problem.
