Greece published Law 5324/2026 in the Government Gazette on 30 July 2026, and buried in a statute mostly about museums, cultural heritage and underwater archaeology is a clause about music royalties that have not moved since 2018.
It is Article 120, and it is the most consequential thing to happen to Greek songwriter money in years.
The clause that unfreezes 2018
CMO means collective management organisation: the body that licenses songs to radio, venues and platforms, then pays songwriters and publishers.
Greece’s was AEPI. Its licence was revoked in 2018 and the company went into insolvency, leaving a pool of royalties collected from users but never distributed to the people who wrote the songs.
Article 120 creates a dedicated mechanism for that pool. It expressly empowers the insolvency administrator to participate in managing and distributing the funds, which is the legal authority that had been missing.
A briefing from Bernitsas Law, published 7 August 2026 by Lambros Belessis and Marialena Mavrikaki, describes the aim as enabling payment of long-outstanding royalties to eligible creators in a process unresolved for several years.
The law names no amount and sets no deadline.
For scale: in a January 2026 interview with George Gilson for To Vima, EDEM general director Louka Katseli said the family that ran AEPI took an estimated 40 million euros in four years. AEPI’s general manager was convicted in April 2025 and sentenced to nine years, later reduced to seven.
The levy clock just slowed to three years
This part touches every rightsholder collecting in Greece today, not only AEPI’s creditors.
Private copying remuneration is the levy on blank media and recording-capable devices, split among categories of rightsholders. The Hellenic Copyright Organisation, known as OPI, set that allocation every year.
Articles 117 and 130 replace the annual cycle with a three-year one, unless the competent CMOs agree a split sooner. As a transitional measure, the allocation adopted for 2025 carries through 2026 and 2027.
Read that as predictability for the societies and a frozen share for anyone who thinks their category is under-weighted. The next scheduled argument is 2028.
The rest is housekeeping with teeth. Article 115 tightens how equitable remuneration is set when a CMO and a user cannot agree. Article 116 lets CMOs spend retained deductions on social and cultural programmes. Articles 118, 119 and 129 rework OPI’s funding and the appointment of its director.
Meanwhile, the half of the market that pays on time
AUTODIA, the other major Greek music society, paid out more than 11 million euros net to its creators and rightsholders for the first half of 2026, up 20% on the same period in 2025, with statements going out from 8 July, as reported by Mononews. Its approved 2025 results show:
- Revenue of 37.5 million euros, up 23.5%
- Net royalties to members above 28 million euros, up 22.7%
- Online rights, meaning music streaming and video on demand, at 8.5 million euros
- Members on direct contract at 2,210, up 17.5%
That online line is the story. Roughly 8.5 million of a 28 million euro payout comes from a pipe that barely existed when AEPI collapsed.
What a Greek release should actually do
- Register the composition with a Greek CMO as a writer, separately from the recording. A distributor delivering your master does not register your song.
- If you or an heir held works in AEPI’s repertoire before 2018, keep the paperwork current. Article 120 is a route, not an automatic payment.
- Do not budget around private copying. Its allocation is fixed until 2028.
- Treat the recording rail as the fast money and reconcile it monthly.
- Keep ISRC and ISWC codes on the same metadata sheet. Cross-border publishing money disappears at the mismatch.
Two rails, two speeds
Greece is rebuilding its statutory rail by legislation eight years after a collapse, while the digital rail compounds at 20% a year.
DDEX means Digital Data Exchange, the metadata standard streaming services ingest.
InterSpace Distribution runs DDEX-native delivery with multi-party splits set at release and territory-level reporting in the artist dashboard. When one income stream is waiting on an insolvency administrator, the other needs to be legible.
Related reading: Greece’s Spotify Top 20 is entirely Greek rap, Romania’s music money still comes from radio, and Iceland’s music fund paid out 92 million kronur.
