Hungary’s authors’ society Artisjus paid out 15.195 billion forints in songwriting royalties for 2025, roughly 41.7 million euros, and 22,945 rightsholders shared it. Seventy-six of them earned more than twice the Hungarian average wage from royalties alone.
The figures come from Artisjus annual distribution data, reported by HVG on 11 February 2026 and by Kreatív. Payouts rose 12 percent on the 13.538 billion forints distributed in 2024, and in real terms sit 5.9 percent above the pre-pandemic level.
Split the pool and the average is under one month’s pay
Across 22,945 recipients that averages about 662,000 forints a year, near 1,800 euros at the European Central Bank reference rate of 18 September 2026. It is less than one month of Hungarian salary: the statistics office KSH put gross average monthly earnings for full-time employees at 705,000 forints across 2025.
The shape around the average is the story. 76 songwriters cleared twice the average wage on royalties alone, beating the previous high of 70 set in 2020. Another 915 cleared a fifth of it, about 1.7 million forints for the year.
Hungarian repertoire now takes 59 percent of everything collected, and none of the 30 most-streamed compositions of 2025 had a single author. The average was 4.8 writers per top-30 streaming song, against 2.6 on a radio hit. Splits get thinner before they get bigger.
Online money in Hungary is claim-based, not swept up
Artisjus licenses Hungarian repertoire directly into the whole European market, plus the Middle East and Africa, and pays out the resulting royalties itself, as its online royalties page sets out.
The same page states the model plainly: for most services it is claim-based, so Artisjus can only invoice the share falling on works it represents. Identify the plays, claim the share, resolve conflicts with other societies.
Scale explains why matching fails. Artisjus says a radio channel’s quarterly log runs to about 30,000 lines, while a single digital service can file 10 billion lines for one quarter, equivalent to processing 320,000 radio stations.
The ISRC step most writers skip
ISRC means International Standard Recording Code, the identifier on each individual recording, issued through your distributor at delivery.
Artisjus instructs writers to enter those ISRCs into its SZIR portal against each registered work, under Művek, then Művek módosítása. Its own guidance warns that without them, the chance of plays being identified among billions of lines drops drastically.
Your distributor owns the recording identifier, the society owns the work registration, and nobody joins them unless you do. It is the failure we have called metadata debt.
What the society keeps
The 2025 Felosztási Szabályzat, the distribution rulebook, prices it out:
- Internet royalties: 15 percent collection fee, and 0 percent distribution fee on top.
- Public performance and broadcast: 17 percent collection, plus 10 percent on distributed performance royalties.
- Royalties handed over by a foreign society, including mandated multi-territorial online: 8 percent.
Online is the cheapest line Artisjus runs. Czech society OSA grew streaming royalties 28 percent in 2025 on a comparable model, and Austria’s median streaming mechanical was 80 cents. Cheap online administration on a thin per-writer base is the regional pattern.
Three forints a play, capped at two million
The same rulebook carries an online royalty advance barely discussed outside Hungary. Section 3.3 sets it at three times the play count of the preceding four weeks, expressed in forints, capped at 2,000,000 forints before deductions and excluding VAT, about 5,500 euros. Three forints a play is roughly 0.8 euro cents, paid up front against future writer share.
The conditions are specific. The performer needs 30,000 followers and 100,000 plays in the trailing four weeks on the leading Hungarian subscription service, half from a Hungarian audience. The writer needs a 25 percent share in one of the three most-played works, 20 registered works, and an exclusive Artisjus mandate for Hungary across every economic right.
Plan around the calendar
Radio and television are distributed once a year, in May. Concerts, mechanical income and private copying follow in June. Online, sound recording, foreign income and background music pay out continuously. From 1 January 2027, podcasts get their own distribution category and cinema film music moves to quarterly, under rule changes the delegates assembly adopted on 29 May 2026, reported by Dalszerző.
The sequence for a Hungarian release is short. Take the ISRCs from your distributor at delivery, register the work and splits before release, push those ISRCs into SZIR, then check the advance thresholds. InterSpace Distribution returns ISRC and UPC data in artist-facing reporting for exactly that reason.
