In Brazil, a songwriter with no publisher collects roughly a quarter of the song money a stream generates. The market convention sets aside 12 percent of a play for the composition, and only the 3 percent routed through ECAD reliably reaches a writer who self-administers.
The other 9 percent is the digital mechanical, and the pipe it travels through was built for publishers.
How the 12 percent splits
Tratore, Brazil’s largest independent distributor, laid out the chain in a May 2023 explainer. The platform generally keeps around 30 percent, 12 percent goes to authorial rights, and the remaining 58 percent flows to the distributor or label.
- 3 percent, public performance. ECAD means Escritório Central de Arrecadação e Distribuição, the central office that bills platforms because Brazil’s Superior Court of Justice treats a stream as public performance. It pays authors and publishers through the seven associations: Abramus, Amar, Assim, Sbacem, Sicam, Socinpro and UBC. Abramus, citing ECAD, confirms the 3 percent figure and the quarterly, direct distribution.
- 9 percent, digital mechanical. This share goes to UBEM, the União Brasileira de Editoras de Música, a non-profit founded in May 2010 whose members are mostly publishing companies, per POPline’s Láisa Naiane.
If a publisher represents the work, both flows land with the publisher, which then pays the writer under contract. If there is no publisher, only the ECAD share comes back through the writer’s association.
Why the 9 percent gets stuck
Tratore’s own wording is that for writers without a publisher, the UBEM share “tende a ficar retida”: it tends to stay held, because UBEM represents publishers and catalogues, not individual composers.
The processing does not even sit in Brazil. UBEM hired BackOffice Music Services, an Argentine outsourcing firm, after Apple made UBEM its iTunes mechanical intermediary in 2011, POPline reported. UBEM later gave up exclusivity, which opened room for association-linked digital arms such as Abramus Digital and Socinpro Digital. Every one of those routes still requires a publisher.
The pool is not small. Abramus Digital said in 2021 that it represented more than 6 million works from over 200 publishers and distributed about R$65 million across 2019 and 2020. Brazil’s recorded digital revenue has since reached R$3.4 billion in 2025, per Pró-Música Brasil figures reported by Agência Brasil.
UBEM is a trade body, not your society
You cannot join UBEM as a writer, and its role outside streaming is contested. In February 2025 Brazil’s competition authority CADE opened proceeding 08700.008710/2024-88 against it over minimum price tables in sync licensing, after a complaint by broadcaster SBT, and ordered it to stop negotiating collectively in the meantime.
The case is about sync, not streaming. It is still a reminder that whichever publisher you route through becomes the party negotiating your songs.
What a self-releasing songwriter should do
Pick one route to the 9 percent
- Collection-only representation. Tratore’s Digi_Tratore agreement lets the distributor represent the work with UBEM for collection while the composition stays under the author’s direct administration, explicitly not a publishing deal. Ask any distributor whether it offers an equivalent.
- Your own editora. Register a publishing company and affiliate it with an association’s digital arm. More paperwork, no share given away.
- A publishing or admin deal. Simplest, but you trade a contractual percentage and, often, sync control.
Then fix the plumbing
- Register every work with your association first, or the 3 percent fails too. Our breakdown of how ECAD pays streaming covers the quarterly lag.
- Make sure work data reaches the mechanical processor. BackOffice ingests registrations in CWR, meaning Common Works Registration, and ISWC, the International Standard Musical Work Code, per publisher Inoveplay.
- Treat 12, 9 and 3 as market convention reported by Tratore, not statute. Confirm the current split in writing.
- Ask for Brazilian digital mechanicals as a separate statement line. If you cannot see it, assume it is not being collected.
Splits between co-writers make this harder, as Brazilian phonk’s credit problem shows. A distributor pays the master side, which InterSpace Distribution reports line by line with multi-party splits, but the song side is a separate claim that only you can set up. For the recording side, see our guide to distributing from Brazil.
