Kazakhstan rewrote the legal plumbing under its music royalties twice in two days, and almost nobody outside Almaty noticed.
Law No. 233-VIII entered into force on 25 January 2026. The next day, the Ministry of Justice issued Order No. 76. Together they decide who may collect songwriter money in Kazakhstan and how it moves.
Kazakhstan anchors a Central Asian streaming market that spent a decade building its own pop genre, Q-pop, with real export ambition.
What Law No. 233-VIII actually does
CMO means collective management organisation: the body that licenses public performance and broadcast use, then pays songwriters and publishers.
The new law routes those organisations through a single state digital platform administered by Qazpatent, the national IP institute. IPSTYLE and Mondaq both put full implementation at January 2027, with a staged rollout in between.
It also lets rightsholders record economic rights, not only moral rights, in the state register, and lets the Ministry of Justice open unscheduled inspections on a rightsholder complaint.
Order No. 76 thins the field
Order No. 76 sets accreditation criteria for any CMO in the country. Per Inbusiness.kz, an accredited society must show:
- At least 500 members who have assigned property rights to it
- At least five years of operation since registration as a legal entity
- At least 20 documented distributions of collected remuneration
- At least five active reciprocal agreements with foreign societies
- Evidence of payments actually transferred to foreign CMOs over the past five years
Read that as a filter, not a checklist. Few Kazakh societies clear all five.
Why CISAC wrote to the President
On 23 October 2025, CISAC published a joint letter to President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev and Senate chair Maulen Ashimbayev, co-signed by IFRRO, IAF, IFPI and IMPF, five bodies representing over 200 CMOs and five million creators.
Their objection: “significant and chronic shortcomings” in the copyright framework, plus draft legislation they said risks interfering with the private nature of collective rights.
It was not the first letter. In January 2024, IFRRO, CISAC and IFPI objected to a Senate proposal to replace private collective management with a single state-controlled entity, arguing the deficiencies would “not be addressed via an arbitrary nationalisation of the system, but rather through its proper modernisation.” CISAC’s member society in Kazakhstan is KazAK. Neighbouring-rights money for performers and phonogram producers sits with a separate body, Amanat.
The AI law that landed a week earlier
Kazakhstan’s standalone Law on Artificial Intelligence took effect on 18 January 2026. Article 23 protects AI-assisted works only where a human creative contribution is present, treating AI as a tool rather than an author, per analysis on Mondaq. Authors must signal a training opt-out in machine-readable form before developers are obliged to respect it.
For a catalogue owner, that makes AI disclosure a delivery-metadata problem, not a press-release problem.
What a Q-pop act should actually do
Q-pop was named in 2015 by fans of Ninety One, the Q borrowed from the Latin-script spelling of Qazaqstan. This year the scene shared a bill with Korean acts at IONE FEST in Almaty Arena. The export lane runs east as much as west.
The practical split for any artist or label here:
- Publishing money runs through an accredited CMO and, from 2027, the Qazpatent platform. Register the works, then check which society still holds accreditation under Order No. 76.
- Recording money does not. It arrives through your distributor, from the DSPs, on a separate clock.
- DSP means digital service provider, and in Kazakhstan that is not just Spotify. Statista’s survey of digital music brands put Spotify at roughly a quarter of the market, with Zvuk on 23% and Yandex Music on 22%.
- Yandex Music runs across eleven markets in the region, from Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan to Georgia and Armenia. A delivery that skips it skips the audience.
DDEX means Digital Data Exchange, the metadata standard DSPs use to ingest releases. Getting territory, split and AI-disclosure fields right at delivery is the difference between a Kazakh songwriter landing correctly in the new register and sitting in a suspense account nobody audits.
Related reading: YouTube monetization for Kazakh music labels, choosing an MCN as a Central Asian artist, and Greece’s post-AEPI royalty rebuild, the same problem from the other end of the Black Sea.
