Madagascar’s music royalty tariffs are still set by a 1998 decree, Décret n° 98-435, denominated in Malagasy francs, a currency retired on 1 January 2005.
That is not a filing curiosity. It is why a Malagasy artist’s streaming income and their collecting society income have nothing to do with each other.
What the 1998 schedule actually charges
The decree fixes every rate the Office Malagasy du Droit d’Auteur can collect. OMDA means the Malagasy copyright office, created in 1984 and given exclusive administration of copyright and neighbouring rights by Décret n° 98-434.
- Paid concerts: 6 percent of gross box office
- Free-entry events: 6 percent of gross spend
- Radio and television: 7 percent of operating budget or advertising revenue
- Nightclubs and cabarets: 7 percent of net receipts
- Music in cinema: 3 percent of box office
- Advertising music: 10,000 FMG per 30 seconds on radio, 50,000 FMG on television
Ten thousand Malagasy francs is 2,000 ariary at the fixed 5-to-1 conversion. At the early-September 2026 rate of roughly 4,300 ariary to the dollar, the music in a thirty-second radio spot is priced at about 46 US cents.
The percentages have not moved. L’Express de Madagascar reported in January 2024 that OMDA still withholds 6 percent on paid shows and 6 percent of gross spend on free ones, the exact figures written in 1998. It put membership at 8,896.
Performers get no independent line. Under the same decree, the equitable remuneration owed to performing artists and phonogram producers is set at 20 percent of the author royalty collected. The master side of a Malagasy record is a derivative of the publishing side, not a claim that stands on its own.
There is no digital tariff, and no law that would create one
Nothing in the schedule covers on-demand streaming, downloads or user-generated content. None of those were licensable categories in Madagascar when it was drafted, and WIPO Lex still lists Law 94-036 as the copyright law in force.
A rewrite has been circling for four years. Deputy Paul Bert Rahasimanana, who performs as Rossy, tabled a bill in June 2022 to loosen ministerial control of OMDA on a SACEM model, noting the office ran on roughly 100 million ariary a year in ministry subsidy.
By 23 January 2023 the same paper reported the Culture Ministry disputing whether the proposed “independent administrative authority” status was lawful at all, and members unpaid since 2022.
Haja Ranjarivo, removed as director general in February 2022, took the post back on 10 December 2024, promising regional representatives and a new decree “in finalisation.” On 6 August 2026 the ethnomusicologist Jimmy Hilarion Rakotonavory was elected board president for three years. Four years of leadership turnover, and the tariff book has not changed a line.
What a Malagasy release should actually do
The rule holds anywhere a society’s tariff book predates streaming, which is most of the continent.
Treat OMDA and your distributor as two separate pipes
OMDA collects offline: broadcast, venues, live, reproduction. Nothing earned on Spotify, Deezer, YouTube or Boomplay reaches you through it. Registering works there protects the domestic performance side and does nothing for the digital side, the same split we documented in Namibia.
Size the domestic market honestly
DataReportal counted 6.71 million internet users in Madagascar at the end of 2025, 20.4 percent penetration, against 21.8 million mobile connections. Domestic streaming volume is thin. The money in a salegy, tsapiky or Malagasy rap release is export and diaspora, which makes territorial reporting worth more than a local chart position.
Write the splits down before release
With performer remuneration pegged to a fraction of the author share, contributor splits agreed verbally in a studio are close to unrecoverable later. Burkina Faso is trying to pay out 508 million CFA that nobody has claimed. The arithmetic was never the problem. Documentation was.
A distributor filing DDEX-compliant metadata, DDEX being the Digital Data Exchange standard the DSPs ingest, and reporting by territory gives a Malagasy rightsholder what the 1998 decree cannot: a per-market record of what was earned and by whom. Senegal’s ringback-heavy payout shows what happens when that record lives only on the society’s side.
