Ecuador’s oldest collective management organisation distributed more than 6.6 million dollars in author royalties in its 2023 accounting, according to reporting by Diario Correo. Ecuadorian members received 878,000 dollars of it.
CMO means collective management organisation, the body that licenses music to bars, radio and TV and pays songwriters and rights holders. In Ecuador that body for authors is SAYCE, the Sociedad de Autores y Compositores del Ecuador.
The rest of that 6.6 million went where the repertoire came from. More than 3.4 million dollars was remitted to foreign sister societies. Another 1.5 million went to publishers. And 783,000 dollars landed in a bucket for unidentified works and public domain.
Ecuador licenses foreign music to Ecuadorian venues
SAYCE holds reciprocal contracts with roughly 122 countries and says between 98 and 98.5 percent of the music sounding in Ecuador sits inside its administered repertoire. That is a coverage claim, not a local-content claim.
The charts back it up. On the week of 30 July 2026, kworb’s Spotify Ecuador weekly had no Ecuadorian act in the top 10. The names were Spanish, Cuban, Korean, Puerto Rican, Mexican and Venezuelan: Aitana, Ya Ice Dilan, BTS, Omar Courtz, Fuerza Regida, Danny Ocean.
So the licence fee a Guayaquil karaoke pays is real money collected in Ecuador that mostly leaves Ecuador. That is not a scandal. It is what reciprocity is for. It does mean the domestic collection line is a weak proxy for what Ecuadorian artists earn.
The tariff side was repriced in January
SENADI, the Servicio Nacional de Derechos Intelectuales, approved a new phonogram tariff regime by Resolution 037-2025-DG-SENADI, published in Registro Oficial Second Supplement No. 207 on 20 January 2026. It was set in coordination with SOPROFON, the phonogram producers’ society, and SARIME, the performers’ society.
What changed:
- Tariffs are now computed by formula, multiplying hours, operating days, capacity, venue category, zoning and use factors against the unified basic salary.
- A new Zone 5 was created with differentiated rates for establishments in the Amazon region.
- Discounts apply to the tourism sector.
- A nightclub, bar or karaoke pays 884.49 dollars a year for phonogram use, per Radio Pichincha.
Read that alongside the distribution split and the shape is clear. Ecuador is getting better at collecting. The question of who the money resolves to is a separate, unsolved problem.
783,000 dollars with nobody’s name on it
The unidentified-works line is the one an independent artist can actually act on. Money sits there because a usage report arrived without a matchable work identifier, or with a credit string the society could not resolve.
ISWC means International Standard Musical Work Code, the identifier for a composition. ISRC means International Standard Recording Code, the identifier for a specific recording. They are different codes for different rights, and Ecuadorian artists routinely register one and not the other.
- Register the composition with SAYCE and the recording side with SARIME and SOPROFON. These are separate registrations, not one filing.
- Keep writer names spelled identically across your distributor, your CMO filing and the DSP credits. Mismatch is the single biggest cause of unmatched income.
- Ship one ISRC per recording and never recycle it across versions.
- Check your export markets. For most Ecuadorian acts the meaningful audiences are Spain, the United States and Colombia, which means foreign societies, not SAYCE, hold the cash.
November is a collection event
Ecuador’s sectional elections land in November 2026. SAYCE deputy director Ramiro Rodríguez Medina told Diario Correo that campaign use of music, including jingles, adapted lyrics and live rally performances, requires a public communication licence, and that administrative penalties can exceed 60,000 dollars.
Adapted lyrics need explicit authorisation from the rights holder. For a working Ecuadorian songwriter with a recognisable chorus, that is a licensing opportunity with a hard deadline attached.
The pattern here is the same one we found in Peru, in the Dominican Republic and in Venezuela. The home market collects. The artist gets paid abroad. What closes the gap is not a bigger tariff, it is clean, DDEX-native metadata delivered once and matched everywhere. DDEX means Digital Data Exchange, the messaging standard distributors use to send releases and receive reporting.
