Mongolia’s music business runs on two rails that barely touch. One is domestic, newly built and locally owned. The other is a rock band with 961 million streams whose money is booked out of Los Angeles.
The country got its own DSP in September 2025
DSP means digital service provider, the streaming platforms that license recordings and pay out on them.
Sonsy launched on 16 September 2025, built by Mongol Content LLC through its Mongolmusic division, as reported by Music Business Worldwide.
The backend is Tuned Global, the white-label streaming vendor that now runs services in more than 70 markets.
Tuned Global’s own launch note lists Individual, Duo and Family tiers plus a freemium level with offline playback and CD-quality audio.
Mongol Content CEO Unenbat Baatar called it “a major milestone for Mongolia’s digital music industry,” leaning on two decades of local digital media operations behind sites like gogo.mn.
Sonsy is competing directly with Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music and MMusic Mongolia, the incumbent local library.
The audience is already online
Connectivity is not the constraint here. DataReportal’s Digital 2026: Mongolia report puts the country at:
- 2.93 million internet users at the end of 2025, or 83.0 percent penetration
- 2.70 million social media user identities in October 2025, or 76.5 percent of the population
- 4.97 million active cellular connections, equal to 141 percent of the population
- A median fixed download speed of 78.95 Mbps
A market with 83 percent of its people online and a homegrown subscription service does not have a distribution problem. It has a routing problem.
The rights side was rebuilt only five years ago
CMO means collective management organisation, the body that licenses public performance and broadcast uses and pays songwriters.
Mongolia’s is MOSCAP, the Mongolian Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, established in 2011 under article 27 of the Law on Copyright and Related Rights.
The legal frame around it is much newer. CISAC reports that Mongolia approved a new Intellectual Property Law in December 2020, re-enacted its Copyright Law in May 2021, and issued four regulations covering CMO registration and licensing. MOSCAP became the first society relicensed under the new criteria in August 2021, alongside a cooperation agreement with the Intellectual Property Office of Mongolia.
For scale, CISAC’s Global Collections Report 2025 logged 13.97 billion euros collected worldwide in 2024, with digital clearing 5 billion euros for the first time. Mongolia is a rounding error in that figure, which matters: for most Mongolian acts, recording royalties through a distributor will dwarf anything the CMO sends.
The export case study is a metal band
The HU formed in Ulaanbaatar in 2016 and signed to Better Noise Music in the United States. Blabbermouth reports 961 million all-time streams and 483 million video views.
Their 2026 calendar ran through Knebworth Park with Iron Maiden on 11 July, and closes with a 23-city, nine-country European headline tour from 29 September to 31 October with SKÁLD.
Almost none of that revenue touches a Mongolian rail. It is a US label deal, European touring income and global DSP payouts.
What an Ulaanbaatar release should actually do in 2026
- Deliver to Sonsy and the global DSPs in the same release cycle, not as an afterthought two months later
- Register compositions with MOSCAP, but treat the recording side as distributor territory, because that is where the volume is
- Supply metadata in both Cyrillic and Latin script so search and playlist editors can find the act in either market
- Ask your distributor for territory-level reporting, not a single global total, since domestic and diaspora streams behave nothing alike
- Track YouTube as a chart, not a leftover, the way Cambodian rap already does
Local DSPs like Sonsy are exactly the kind of endpoint that majors-focused distributors skip. DDEX means Digital Data Exchange, the delivery standard that makes adding a market like Mongolia a configuration change rather than a rebuild. InterSpace Distribution treats the smaller endpoints as first-class delivery targets for that reason.
Related reading: Cambodia has 10.8 million internet users and no official chart, KKBOX still owns more than 60% of Taiwan’s streaming, and Kazakhstan changed its royalty rules twice in two days.
