JASRAC distributed 151,857,948,386 yen in music royalties across Japan’s fiscal 2025, and 568,990 of the creators it paid were foreign, reached through 121 other collecting societies rather than through any distributor.
That comes from the society’s own distribution results release of 23 March 2026. It is the first year JASRAC has distributed more than 150 billion yen, and the March 2026 period alone moved 42,465,377,446 yen across 4,066,661 works.
CMO means collective management organisation: the body that licenses the song, as distinct from the recording.
JASRAC pays more foreign writers than Japanese ones
The domestic side of that release is 119,298 creators and 3,330 music publishers. The foreign side is 568,990 creators and 64,267 publishers.
Interactive transmissions accounted for roughly 59.4 billion yen of the fiscal 2025 distribution, up 11.7 percent year on year.
Your distributor touches none of it. Distribution pays the master recording. JASRAC pays the composition, and it pays it to your home society, which then pays you. Two pipes, one stream. Our performance royalty explainer covers the split in general; Japan is where the gap gets expensive.
The lag is six to seventeen months
JASRAC states that the March 2026 payout mainly reflects royalties collected between October 2024 and September 2025.
Budget accordingly. A song that lands in Tokyo in November will not produce publishing income in London or Lagos until the following autumn at the earliest.
The commission is 7.5 percent, and only for one quarter
JASRAC’s standard management commission on interactive distribution is 9.5 percent. On 3 February 2026 it cut that to 7.5 percent for the March 2026 distribution period only, alongside broadcasting (8.5 to 7.5 percent) and large-scale performance (12.5 to 10.5 percent).
It did the same thing for the March 2025 period. Treat the discount as annual but discretionary, not as the rate. Then your own society takes its cut on the way in. Two commissions, not one.
There is a second Japanese society, and you can split between them
JASRAC’s relationship with rightsholders is a Copyright Trust Contract: the copyright itself is entrusted, on a three-year term, and since 1 April 2017 trustors can choose which categories of right to hand over.
NexTone, formed in February 2016 from the merger of eLicense and Japan Rights Clearance after the Copyright Management Business Act ended JASRAC’s statutory monopoly, uses a management mandate instead. The copyright stays with the writer.
That is the practical difference. A rightsholder can leave performance and broadcast with JASRAC and place interactive streaming with NexTone.
NexTone’s published terms are unusually legible for a CMO:
- No application fee and no annual membership fee.
- Payouts on 15 March, 15 June, 15 September and 15 December, each covering the previous quarter’s collections.
- A minimum payment threshold of 3,000 yen. Below that, nothing moves.
- Work registration closes roughly ten days before each quarter end, so 21 December for the March payout.
- Contracts take 7 to 10 business days for companies, 15 to 20 for individuals, who face a pre-screening step.
- Foreign works are accepted for Japanese-territory management, and since 1 April 2022 NexTone manages overseas territories too.
What to do before you release into Japan
Register the composition with your home society first, with final splits and an ISWC, and do it ahead of the Japanese release rather than after it. Unmatched works sit unclaimed until somebody files.
Then check J-WID, JASRAC’s public works database, and NexTone’s works database, and confirm the song shows as managed. If neither claims it, no reciprocal payment is coming.
On the recording side the question is simply whether your distributor delivers to the Japanese services where the usage happens, which is a live problem in a market that still runs partly on LINE Music. Broadcast collections fell 5.2 percent in fiscal 2025 as NHK cut its licence fee, while interactive collections rose 9.6 percent to 61.82 billion yen, per Bengoshi.com News on 20 May 2026. The money has moved. The registrations that claim it often have not.
The same discipline applies one market over, where KOMCA runs the K-pop publishing pipe on different rules.
