Taiwan’s karaoke royalties are priced by how many of a society’s songs are loaded into the machine, because the machines do not report what anyone sings.
That choice decides which songwriters get paid by the bars, hotels and community centres that license machines, and why almost a third of the songs on the leading machine sit outside the tariff.
How the karaoke machine fee is built
TIPO means the Taiwan Intellectual Property Office, which reviews society tariffs and fixes joint rates when societies disagree. Taiwan has three music societies: MÜST (Music Copyright Society of Chinese Taipei), ACMA, and TMCA, licensed in June 2020.
Since 2015 TIPO has run a joint-tariff, single-window system, so a venue buys one karaoke licence instead of three. The current terms come from a TIPO decision dated 2 August 2022, in force from 1 January 2023:
- NT$9,400 per machine per year for commercial use, the sum of each society’s approved rate: MÜST 5,000, ACMA 2,000, TMCA 2,400.
- NT$6,580 (70 percent) for cultural or educational use, NT$3,290 (35 percent) for non-profit community use.
- MÜST collects for all three, takes a 3 percent administration fee the societies share, and splits the rest 5:2:2.4.
- Neither side could change the terms for three years.
The split follows each society’s approved rate, not a usage report. TMCA’s arrival lifted the commercial fee from NT$7,000 to NT$9,400, a 34 percent jump the users’ association still cites in TIPO committee minutes from 7 May 2026.
Why plays do not count
The minutes cover ACMA’s bid to raise its machine rate from NT$2,000 to NT$3,000. Both sides agreed plays would be fairer. TIPO asked the three main machine makers for them: one refused, citing trade secrets, and the other two said their machines do not record plays.
So the committee kept the precedent, the reproduction rate: each society’s share of the songs loaded into the machines. ACMA will check the song lists before TIPO rules. The users’ association filed this breakdown of the dominant model, the MDS-655, as of December 2024:
- 16,379 songs loaded
- MÜST: 7,216 (44.1 percent)
- TMCA: 2,604 (15.9 percent)
- ACMA: 1,491 (9.1 percent)
- No society: 5,068 (30.9 percent)
Those 5,068 songs earn nothing from the joint fee.
KTV chains are counted differently
KTV operators, which run one server feeding many private rooms, do keep play logs. In its 23 April 2026 decision, TIPO held ACMA’s KTV rate at NT$500 per room per year, against the NT$3,000 ACMA had announced, plus NT$1.5 per play for chains that report usage.
- TIPO benchmarked ACMA against MÜST’s approved NT$5,000 per room, using the chains’ play and song-list data.
- Cashbox told TIPO it sends play-count lists to MÜST and TMCA every year as the basis for distribution.
- Holiday KTV logged 702,628 plays of ACMA songs in 2024, 1.29 percent of its plays.
Cashbox also told the March 2026 committee that only about 600 of its 1,460 ACMA songs topped 100 plays a year, and that songs whose owners left for TMCA or MÜST stayed on ACMA’s list.
What writers and publishers should do
Register, then check the lookup
TIPO’s music lookup holds over 750,000 records and links to the ISRC database, according to an August 2026 TIPO release. ISRC means International Standard Recording Code. TIPO runs its rate comparisons through this system, so a title it cannot match lands in the no-society column.
Hold each song in one society
Users cite duplicate listings to argue a society’s share down. If you switch, confirm the old society has dropped your titles.
Treat karaoke catalogues as a placement
For machines, being loaded counts. For KTV, plays decide. Ask your Taiwanese sub-publisher which of your songs are in the machine and KTV lists.
The pool is not growing: venues paying entertainment tax fell from 6,212 at the end of 2019 to 4,949 at the end of 2024, finance ministry figures the users’ association cited. Matching starts with clean ISRCs and writer credits, which is why InterSpace Distribution sends both from one metadata record to KKBOX and every other service.
Related: Taiwan still licenses internet streaming at 2012 rates, how JASRAC pays foreign creators and Malaysia’s three-body royalty split.
