Nepal’s Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Civil Aviation formed a five-member committee on 22 May 2026 to investigate music royalty and copyright disputes, and gave it ten days to report back. Khabarhub reported the panel is chaired by Laxman Bidari, with Copyright Registrar Sabita Karki and ministry undersecretary Nirmala Neupane serving as member-secretary.
Its brief covers royalty collection from broadcasters, digital platforms, hotels, restaurants, transport operators and event organisers, plus copyright ownership at Radio Nepal and Nepal Television, according to ICT Frame.
That is an enormous mandate for ten days. It is also an admission that the existing rails are not working.
34,000 letters went out first
A collective management organisation, or CMO, licenses music on behalf of songwriters and publishers and distributes the fees it collects. Nepal has one. The Music Royalty Collection Society Nepal (MRCSN) was established in 2007 and is the government-designated body for performing and mechanical rights under Section 23 of the Copyright Act 2059.
MRCSN had already gone on the offensive. Ratopati reported that the society sent 34,000 letters in one wave to 56 categories of organisation across the country. Legal officer Sapana Gharti Magar described them as a final warning after repeated verbal and written requests, with a three-month window before legal action.
Reporting around the committee’s formation put more than 100 FM stations and over a dozen television channels in Nepal playing music regularly without paying anything.
The money the society will never touch
Here is what the committee’s terms of reference underweight. Even a perfectly functioning MRCSN would not touch most of what a working Nepali artist earns in 2026.
Spotify launched in Nepal in February 2021. OnlineKhabar’s reporting on that launch established the fact that has shaped Nepali artist economics since: platforms pay according to where the listener sits, and a stream from Kathmandu is worth a fraction of one from Sydney.
The domestic market is small. Statista’s forecast puts Nepal’s music streaming market at roughly $1.63 million by 2027.
The audience is not small. April 2025 Viberate data reported by OnlineKhabar had Sushant KC at 863,100 Spotify monthly listeners, Sajjan Raj Vaidya at 357,300 and John Rai at 312,600. Sushant KC played the Palladium in Times Square in July 2024. That is diaspora demand in the United States, Canada, the UK, Germany and Australia, and it pays in those countries’ rates.
Roughly 6,500 Nepali songs went up on YouTube in a single year, per an OnlineKhabar count cited by the Kathmandu Post.
Two pipes, and most artists only plumb one
- CMO money. Public performance and broadcast inside Nepal. This is what the 34,000 letters are chasing, and what the committee was formed to fix.
- Distribution money. Recording and streaming revenue from Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music and the rest, paid at the listener’s territorial rate. MRCSN never sees a rupee of it.
- Foreign performance money. MRCSN’s reciprocal agreements can route overseas songwriter income home, but only for works registered correctly with accurate splits.
Metadata is the joint between them. DDEX, short for Digital Data Exchange, is the messaging standard distributors use to deliver recordings and rights data to platforms. If the writer splits in your DDEX delivery do not match what MRCSN holds, the two systems pay different people, or nobody.
What a Nepali artist should do before the report lands
- Register as an MRCSN member and register every work, not just the singles that charted.
- Confirm every release has a clean ISRC and UPC, and that the same writer splits sit in both the delivery and the society registration.
- Read royalty statements by territory, not by total. If most of your revenue lands in Australia and the US, that is where release strategy belongs.
- Do not assume a domestic label deal covers diaspora markets. Ask which territories it delivers to and which it does not.
This is the same split we have covered in Bangladesh, in Pakistan, and across the local-global paradox generally. A committee can fix the FM stations. It cannot make a Kathmandu stream pay like a Sydney one.
Nepal’s artists need both pipes running at once, with matching data in each. That is a distribution problem, and it is solvable this quarter.
