Dominican music is having its loudest export decade, and the rights plumbing underneath it is being rebuilt in public right now.
Latin America grew 17.1% in 2025, the fastest of any region and its 16th consecutive year of growth, according to IFPI’s Global Music Report 2026 via Music Business Worldwide. Dembow and bachata are riding that. The Dominican system that pays songwriters and performers is not settled.
Four societies, one window
CMO means collective management organization: the body that licenses public performance of music to radio, TV, bars and hotels, then splits the money among rightsholders.
On 3 March 2026, four Dominican bodies signed the country’s first joint collection agreement, reported by Diario Libre:
- Sgacedom (authors and composers)
- Egecam (arrangers)
- Sodinpro (phonogram producers)
- Sodaie (performers)
They now collect through one operational body, the Interasociativo de Recaudación Conjunta de los Derechos Conexos de la Música, backed by José Rubén Gonell Cosme, director of the national copyright office ONDA.
What changes:
- A hotel, broadcaster or platform buys one licence instead of negotiating four.
- Neighbouring rights for producers and performers get collected alongside authors’ rights.
- The signatories committed to implementing private copy compensation, which the Dominican Republic still lacks. Diario Libre reported the parties calling it a historical debt to Dominican creators.
The RD$34.7 million question
In April, Sgacedom, now led by merenguero Kinito Méndez, made its first distribution: RD$34,723,417.51 covering the first quarter of 2026, per Diario Libre.
The categories paid tell you where Dominican author money actually comes from: general rights, live shows, Latinautor, foreign societies, and Netflix.
- Netflix is a named line item. Audiovisual is now a standing revenue category for a Caribbean authors’ society, not a rounding error.
- Latinautor and foreign societies are broken out separately, so cross-border collection is already material. Sgacedom pays quarterly.
The distribution model is in the Supreme Court
On 27 July, Sgacedom publicly defended its new model: pay by measured broadcast frequency rather than committee discretion. The society says it contracted an international monitoring firm and that members now receive monthly reports on how often their works are played, according to DiarioDigitalRD.
Two days later, Diario Libre reported that former directors Pol Mejía and Alejandro Martínez are challenging the society’s 2023 statutes in court, arguing roughly 450 long-standing members lost voting rights and left only 81 eligible voters.
Martínez’s second objection is the one distributors should read twice. He argues the monitoring tracks radio permanently while leaving out most commercial establishments, the hotels, bars and restaurants that generate the bulk of the revenue.
The Superior Administrative Court declared several statute articles null. Sgacedom appealed, and the case now sits with the Supreme Court of Justice.
What a Dominican artist should actually do
None of this touches your streaming money. That is the part most dembow and bachata artists get wrong.
- Your distributor pays recording royalties from Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, Deezer and Amazon.
- Your society pays performance and audiovisual royalties from radio, venues, TV and streaming video.
- They are separate pipes. Registering with one does not register you with the other.
Register on both sides
- Sgacedom for your writing share. Sodaie if you performed on the master. Sodinpro if you own the phonogram.
- Keep ISRC and writer splits identical across both. ISRC means International Standard Recording Code, the 12-character ID attached to every recording.
Chase the foreign share
- Bachata’s deepest social-dance audiences sit in the United States, Spain and Italy. That money comes home through Latinautor and reciprocal deals, and only if the work is registered and matched.
- Compare your society statement against your distributor’s per-territory reporting. If a country shows streams but no author income, something is unclaimed.
DDEX means Digital Data Exchange, the messaging standard distributors use to ship metadata to DSPs. If writer and performer credits are wrong at delivery, no amount of monitoring in Santo Domingo repairs it downstream.
For a scene whose money lands in New York, Madrid and Milan before it lands at home, split accuracy in the delivery file is the whole game. That is the argument for a distributor with real Latin and diaspora DSP coverage plus per-track split reporting an artist can audit.
Related reading: Vietnam’s record royalty year, Peruvian cumbia’s platform split, and Chile’s export-heavy Spotify income.
