Malawi’s Copyright Society distributed K1,819,370,912.46 in blank media levy royalties on 21 July 2026, its largest music royalty payout ever, and calculated every share from data collected at licensed CD and DVD burning centres.
The country’s most-consumed song this year has spent 15 weeks at number one on a chart built from YouTube and Spotify counts.
Those two facts have nothing to do with each other. That is the story.
What the blank media levy actually is
CMO means collective management organisation, the body that licenses music on behalf of writers and performers. In Malawi that is COSOMA, the Copyright Society of Malawi.
The levy is a small fee on devices that store data. The Times Group reports it covers phones, flash drives and memory cards, and that COSOMA administers it with the Malawi Revenue Authority.
The 21 July presentation figures in Lilongwe, reported by the Times Group:
- Total distributed: K1,819,370,912.46, roughly USD 1.05m at mid-August mid-market rates
- Beneficiaries: 3,594, across 25,578 registered works
- Musicians: over K1bn. Writers: over K519m. Filmmakers: over K259m
- Period: April 2025 to March 2026, up from K1bn the prior year
Top earners named at the event included Phyzix, Onesimus, Eli Njuchi, Saint, Driemo and Lucius Banda. Executive director Dora Makwinja asked the sector to “refrain from misinformation.”
The methodology members voted to keep
Malawi24 reported on 4 August that COSOMA still allocates the levy using data from licensed CD and DVD burning centres, and that members rejected a proposal at the annual general meeting to switch to digital consumption data.
The same report splits the roughly K3bn collected into 5 percent to the revenue authority, 5 percent to the Ministry of Finance, 10 percent to the Copyright Fund and 60 percent to rights holders, with a 20 percent withholding tax leaving about K1.44bn actually in hand.
Managers went to COSOMA’s offices on 30 July over it. Akometsi Entertainment’s Kelvin Sulugwe told the Times Group that “there are so many gaps.” Madness Entertainment’s Kelvin Ngumuya added: “Let them be transparent and tell us how they make their calculations.”
Rapper IKK said publicly that he received around K4,900. Face of Malawi quoted COSOMA’s reply that it “is not the same as platforms such as YouTube or Spotify.”
That answer is technically correct. It is also the thing artists most need to understand.
The streaming chart running in parallel
247Malawi reported that Driemo’s “Joker” held number one on the Official Top 50 Malawian Global Streamed Songs Chart for a 15th non-consecutive week on 25 May 2026, on 595,456 YouTube views and 33,526 Spotify streams for a weighted 426,528.
He held three of the top five that week. None of that consumption touched the levy pot. A private copying levy compensates for copying onto physical storage. It does not scale with streams.
Two pipes, not one
DSP means digital service provider: Spotify, YouTube Music, Boomplay, Audiomack, Apple Music. For a Malawian act the money map is simpler than the argument around it.
- Levy and public performance income arrives through COSOMA. Register works and keep bank or mobile money details current, since COSOMA moved this cycle from cash to electronic transfer.
- Streaming and video income arrives through your distributor. COSOMA never touches it.
- Publishing income on the composition is a third stream, and the one most Malawian writers leave unclaimed overseas.
- Without correct ISRC codes, none of the three finds you. ISRC means International Standard Recording Code, the 12-character tag on each recording.
Why the reporting gap matters commercially
The COSOMA fight is less about the size of the cheque than about auditability. Artists cannot see the calculation, so they assume the worst.
Streaming does not have to work that way. Delivery to Boomplay and Audiomack, the services carrying most Southern African listening, is metadata work, and per-platform, per-territory statements are a solved problem. InterSpace Distribution delivers DDEX-native and reports by DSP and territory, so the number is checkable rather than announced. DDEX means Digital Data Exchange, the standard format DSPs accept metadata and royalty reporting in.
Malawi’s levy is real money and worth collecting. It is just not the business.
Related: Zimbabwe’s three-dollar royalty cheques, how Nigerian artists get paid, distribution platforms for Zambian artists.
