On the night of 12 May 2026, Tunisia’s Assembly of People’s Representatives passed the law on the status of the artist and artistic professions by 76 votes in favour, one abstention and nothing against. La Presse de Tunisie reported the plenary, chaired by Ibrahim Bouderbala, closed a file open since 2014.
The text runs to 45 articles. One of them, Article 39, is the one that decides whether Tunisian musicians ever see money from it.
What Tunisia actually passed
Law No. 2026-8 was published in the Official Journal on 14 May, according to Tunisie Numérique. The headline provisions are structural rather than financial:
- A professional card for artists and cultural workers, gating access to state support and social coverage.
- A mandatory written “artistic contract” as the norm for cultural engagements, setting fee, duration and obligations.
- Social protection rebuilt around the intermittent, irregular shape of artistic work, whether salaried or self-employed.
- Minimum broadcast quotas for Tunisian works on audiovisual media.
- Digital arts and artificial intelligence written formally into the definition of artistic professions.
That is a real upgrade on a framework professionals had called obsolete for a decade. It is also almost entirely about status, not about cash flow.
Article 39 is the money clause, and the number is missing
Article 39 names telecoms operators, internet service providers and digital distribution platforms as parties liable to contribute to the financing of copyright and neighbouring rights. The contribution is proportional to their revenues.
The rate is not in the law. As Tunisie Haut Débit read the text, the modalities “seront fixées par décret,” and the article carries no percentage, no deadline for that decree, and no named collection mechanism.
OTDAV, the Tunisian copyright and neighbouring rights body, is not referenced in the operative provision. A CMO, meaning collective management organisation, is the entity that would normally have to license these payers, invoice them and split the pool. Tunisia has legislated a payer without yet legislating the pipe.
L’Économiste Maghrébin made the same point the day after the vote, noting Tunisia’s cultural industries account for only 0.4 to 0.7 percent of GDP and arguing that the real work starts after adoption, not at it.
The Maghreb’s label infrastructure went to Casablanca instead
Four weeks after the Tunis vote, Universal launched Def Jam Recordings North Africa, headquartered in Casablanca. Music Business Worldwide reported the 11 June announcement, with UMG’s Adam Granite, Def Jam’s Tunji Balogun, UMG MENA CEO Patrick Boulos and Sylvain Mahy of Universal Music Morocco and North Africa attached.
The division’s territory includes Tunisia. Its initial roster does not: Najm, SHR and Aujiss are all Moroccan, alongside producers Oldygothesound, Bayadis and Nouvo.
MBW cites 15.2 percent MENA revenue growth in 2025, joint second-fastest region in the world. Tunisian artists sit inside that growth number and outside the signing pipeline pointed at it.
What a Tunisian artist or label should do before the decree lands
- Register with OTDAV now. Membership is the only route into a domestic pool, and backdated claims are harder than forward ones.
- Fix metadata first. Any Article 39 pool will be split on usage data, which means an ISRC, meaning International Standard Recording Code, on every recording and an ISWC on every composition.
- Document splits per track, in writing, before release. Retro-fitting a split after a payout exists is where Maghreb catalogues lose money.
- Treat Anghami as a primary store, not a checkbox. Arabic-language catalogue and editorial depth still sit there, and per-stream rates in-region are not identical to Spotify’s.
- Do not build a cash-flow plan on the decree. Recording and publishing income on DSP rails is the money that exists this quarter.
This is the pattern across the region: legislation arrives first, the payment plumbing arrives years later, and in the gap the recording rail is the only thing paying. A distributor that treats Anghami, Spotify and YouTube as equal delivery targets, ships DDEX-standard metadata, meaning Digital Data Exchange, and reports splits at track level is not a nice-to-have in that gap. It is the whole income statement.
Related reading: Morocco rewrote its 26-year-old copyright law, Saudi Arabia’s first neighbouring rights law, and Def Jam’s North Africa division.
