On 1 December 2026, playing music in a Dubai cafe stops being free.
That is the date the United Arab Emirates’ approved music licensing rate card takes effect, according to a 20 July 2026 note from DLA Piper. Restaurants, hotels, retail outlets, gyms and broadcasters all fall inside it.
It is the first time the Gulf’s biggest music consumption market has had a working public performance rail. It is also not where most UAE music money actually moves.
What the rate card covers
The regime is administered by two licensed societies rather than one national monopoly. Businesses can already apply, individually or as a group, ahead of the December deadline.
- In scope: restaurants and cafes, hotels, retail, gyms, television and radio broadcasting.
- Fee drivers: business type, venue size and how the music is used. Live performances and DJ sets sit above background music.
- Exempt: government entities, educational institutions, non-commercial charitable events.
- Live date: annual licensing fees apply from 1 December 2026.
For scale, the Ministry of Economy and Tourism’s own June 2025 announcement put 350 live music venues in Dubai alone.
Two societies, eighteen months old
A CMO means collective management organisation, the body that licenses music to venues and broadcasters in bulk and then splits the money back to writers, publishers and performers.
The UAE had none until recently. The Emirates Music Rights Association, EMRA, took the country’s first collective management licence in April 2025, reported by Music Business Worldwide. Music Nation for Rights Management followed on 2 June 2025 under Federal Decree-Law No. 38 of 2021, and has partnered with BMI and SoundExchange.
The international plumbing arrived in February. Sacem signed a representation agreement with EMRA on 25 February 2026, with a framework covering both authors’ and neighbouring rights built alongside IFPI and PPL. Sacem’s release also noted that cultural and creative industries contributed 3.5 percent of UAE GDP in 2022, about 54.4 billion dirhams.
The timing is regional, not accidental. Saudi Arabia’s first neighbouring rights law took effect this month, and the Gulf is rebuilding its rights infrastructure in the same eighteen-month window.
The pot the rate card does not touch
Here is the gap. A venue licence collects for public performance. It does not collect the streaming royalty, which is where the growth is.
The IFPI Global Music Report 2026 put global recorded revenue at 31.7 billion dollars in 2025, up 6.4 percent. The Middle East and North Africa grew 15.2 percent, joint second-fastest of any region, and streaming made up 97.5 percent of the regional total.
Who receives that money in the UAE is the awkward part. Spotify’s 2025 Wrapped for the market, summarised by Campaign Middle East, had Drake as the country’s most-streamed artist, “Die With A Smile” as the top song and Billie Eilish’s album on top. The leading Arabic track was Sabah Mahmod’s “Aftini.”
Every one of those payouts leaves the country through label and distributor accounting, not through a Dubai venue licence.
What a UAE artist should do before December
The two rails pay for different things, and you need both switched on.
- If you write: register your works with a licensed society so the venue and broadcast pot has a name attached to it.
- If you record: your streaming income comes from delivery, so keep ISRC and UPC codes, contributor credits and split percentages accurate at upload.
- Cover the regional stores: Anghami, now being taken private out of Abu Dhabi, still carries Gulf listening that global-only delivery lists skip.
- If you run a venue: apply now, group licences exist, and audits have already started.
Mark Abou Jaoude, Spotify’s head of music for the region, told The National in January that 77 percent of discovery streams in the region went to emerging artists rather than established acts, and that artists no longer feel they have to sound international to travel.
That is a distribution problem before it is a licensing one. InterSpace Distribution delivers on DDEX, Digital Data Exchange, the metadata standard DSPs read, and reports splits at track level so a Gulf release is not waiting on a rate card to get paid.
