Taiwan’s copyright regulator spent three years reviewing a new royalty rate for internet streaming, then deleted it. The rate schedule that governs how music is licensed for online transmission in Taiwan still dates to 2012.
That is the domestic rail. The export rail moved on without it.
What TIPO actually struck down
CMO means collective management organisation, the body that licenses rights on behalf of many rightsholders and splits the money back out. In Taiwan, the main one for musical works is MÜST, the Music Copyright Society of Chinese Taipei.
OTT means over-the-top, shorthand for services that deliver audio or video straight over the internet rather than through a broadcast channel.
The sequence, as reported by IP counsel summarising the decision on Mondaq:
- On 31 March 2022, MÜST filed new public transmission rates aimed at OTT operators that produce and broadcast their own programming.
- The proposal was 3.5% of the operator’s total revenue from the previous year, or NT$1.12 per stream for content made freely available.
- On 29 May 2025, Taiwan’s Intellectual Property Office ruled the new rates should be deleted.
- TIPO’s reasoning: the rates overlapped with the existing 2012 schedule, the calculation base swept in revenue unrelated to music, and the conditions attached to the discounted tier breached the equal treatment principle in Article 34, Paragraph 1 of the Collective Management Organization Act.
So the 2012 rates stand. A Taiwanese streaming licence in 2026 is priced against a schedule written before Spotify entered the market in 2013.
Three societies before you reach the recording
Public performance in musical works in Taiwan is not managed by one body. MÜST sits alongside MCAT and TMCS, and TIPO-determined rates run on three-year terms, per a Lexology summary of the office’s rate reviews.
That is the publishing side only. The recording side is licensed separately, which is where a distributor’s delivery actually lands. It is a fragmented counterparty map for a market of 23 million people.
The audience moved before the rate card did
Mandopop passed 500 million monthly streams on Spotify, up roughly 45% year on year, and the countries where it was growing fastest were Brazil, India, Mexico and Germany, Music Ally reported.
None of those four is a Chinese-speaking market. None of them routes a cent through MÜST’s rate card.
The pipeline keeps widening. Spotify’s 2026 RADAR Asia class, announced in May, included eight Taiwanese acts, among them Lu Yun. Spotify also noted that almost half the top 20 most globally streamed RADAR artists in 2025 came from Asia, and that the number of languages in the Global Top 50 more than doubled between 2020 and 2025.
At home, the 37th Golden Melody Awards in Taipei in late June gave Album of the Year to Jolin Tsai for “Pleasure,” with Ayal Komod taking Best Mandarin Male Singer and Sunset Rollercoaster winning Best Band, the Taipei Times reported. The ceremony also awards Tai-gi, Hakka and indigenous-language categories, including Paiwan.
Regionally the money is there. IFPI put global recorded revenues at 31.7 billion dollars in 2025, up 6.4%, with Asia growing 10.9%, as Music Business Worldwide reported.
What a Taiwanese release should do about it
ISRC means International Standard Recording Code, the unique identifier that tells every platform which recording is being played and who should be paid.
- Register the composition with your society and register the recording metadata separately. They are two revenue streams and two claim processes.
- Do not treat KKBOX as optional. It remains the largest single service in Taiwan, and plenty of global distributors never deliver to it.
- Add LINE MUSIC and JOOX to the delivery list for Taiwan, Hong Kong and Southeast Asia reach.
- Track your listener map by territory. If Brazil and Mexico are climbing, per-stream rates and playlist logic there differ from Taipei’s.
- Lock split sheets before release. Cross-border claims are far harder to unwind after a track charts abroad.
Related reading: KKBOX still owns more than 60% of Taiwan’s streaming, and why Japan’s charts stay 81% local.
A frozen 2012 rate card is not something an artist can fix. Delivering to the services where the growth is actually happening, with clean identifiers on both the composition and the recording, is.
