Mozambique music royalties are getting their first dedicated rulebook for collective management, and it will not touch a cent of the streaming money.
The Instituto Nacional das Indústrias Culturais e Criativas (INICC) is drafting a Regime Jurídico das Entidades de Gestão Colectiva dos Direitos de Autor e Direitos Conexos, according to reports published on 10 August 2026 by O País and Jornal Notícias.
CMO means collective management organisation: the body that licenses public performance of songs and pays the writers. Mozambique has three of them and no framework law telling any of them how to operate.
Three societies, no rulebook
The bodies INICC names are:
- SOMAS, the Associação Moçambicana de Autores, created in 2000.
- SMDA, the Sociedade Moçambicana dos Direitos Autorais.
- SMAutores, the Sociedade Moçambicana de Autores.
INICC’s own diagnosis, per O País, is blunt: opaque revenue management and distribution, ineffective collection systems, and creators who are never told how tariffs are set.
The instrument is still in interministerial harmonisation and consultation with cultural associations, private institutions and the societies themselves. No commencement date has been announced.
The reference frameworks INICC cites are Malawi, Angola, Kenya, Cape Verde, Portugal and Brazil. Two of those are worth a look before Maputo copies them. Malawi’s COSOMA record payout this July was calculated largely from a blank-media levy, not from streams. Angola runs a single-society model that pays songwriters in kwanzas per spin while the streaming income arrives somewhere else entirely.
The law landed in 2022. The plumbing did not.
Mozambique already replaced its copyright statute. Law 9/2022 entered into force on 26 September 2022, repealing Law 4/2001, and Article 9 recognises authorship independently of registration or any other formality, as summarised by IP firm Inventa. Decree 46/2024 of 27 June 2024 added the implementing regulation.
Four years on, the practical gap shows up in domestic arguments rather than in distributions. A 2025 row covered by Moz Entretenimento, sparked by rapper Denny OG over cover performances in bars and at weddings, turned on two facts nobody disputed: the licence obligation sits with the venue, not the performer, and most Mozambican authors have never formally registered their works with a society at all.
The recorded side runs on a completely different rail
Whatever the new regime says about performance licensing, it does not govern the recording. That money moves through distribution.
- DataReportal’s Digital 2026 Mozambique report counts 7.12 million internet users at the end of 2025, 19.8 percent penetration, against 19.1 million mobile connections.
- Mr Bow, the country’s best-known jango-marrabenta export, sits at roughly 91,000 Spotify monthly listeners. That is a real audience, and a small one by regional standards.
- Mozambique’s biggest global record needed a Lagos co-sign. DJ Tàrico’s “Yaba Buluku” first appeared on his own Moz Piano Vol. 2 in November 2020; the Burna Boy remix that GhanaWeb credited with putting Mozambican music on the map arrived in June 2021 and carried the song worldwide.
That is the Lusophone Africa pattern: society reform and the money-making catalogue sit on separate tracks, and the catalogue leaves.
What Mozambican artists should do this quarter
- Register works with a society anyway. Rights exist without registration under Article 9, but no CMO pays a work it cannot match to a writer.
- Do not let society membership decide your recording rights. Performance royalties and master royalties are different pots with different counterparties.
- Own your ISRCs. ISRC means International Standard Recording Code, the identifier every DSP uses to attribute a stream. If a third party holds it, your reporting is their reporting.
- Get on the regional platforms, not just the global three. Boomplay, Audiomack and Mdundo index Southern African catalogue that Spotify editorial does not reach.
- Fix splits before release, in writing. A split agreed after release is a split you will end up arguing about.
InterSpace Distribution delivers via DDEX, which means Digital Data Exchange, the standard metadata format DSPs ingest, and reports splits per contributor in the artist royalty dashboard. For a Mozambican writer waiting on a framework law that has no commencement date, the recording rail is the one that already works. Our complete 2026 guide to music distribution across Africa covers the platform-by-platform mechanics.
