Uruguay has 3.4 million people and a recorded music market small enough to disappear into a rounding error next to Brazil’s. In November 2023 it nearly became the first country Spotify walked out of.
It didn’t. And the compromise that kept the service switched on is the reason Uruguayan performers still are not collecting the digital money the law promised them.
What Law 20.212 actually changed
Articles 329 through 332 of Law No. 20.212, promulgated 6 November 2023, rewrote Articles 36, 39 and 58 of Uruguay’s 1937 copyright statute, Law 9.739.
- The substance: performers earn a “justa y equitativa” remuneration when a recording is communicated or made available to the public online, not only when it plays on radio or television.
- The push came from SUDEI, the Sociedad Uruguaya de Intérpretes. SUDEI is a CMO. CMO means collective management organisation, a body that licenses uses in bulk and distributes the proceeds to its members.
- Spotify read the amendment as paying twice for the same stream and said it would begin phasing out service in Uruguay from 1 January 2024.
The decree that kept Spotify in the country
Decreto 404/023 was promulgated on 12 December 2023 and took effect 1 January 2024. Its Article 2 is the whole story.
The obligation to pay the performer falls on the party with whom the performer contracted, meaning the producer of the phonogram or audiovisual recording. Not the platform.
Spotify reversed its exit that same week, citing government assurances that there would be no double payment. The right survived. The payer changed.
Two years on, the invoice has nowhere to go
Uruguayan musicians are still not receiving digital remuneration under the law. El Observador reported that SUDEI circulated a signature drive among members demanding the decree be applied, and that the society took the question to the Ministry of Industry.
This is the structural trap in routing a statutory right through a private contract. If the producer is a multinational label, the performer has a counterparty to chase. If the producer is a small Montevideo studio, or the artist themselves, there is no third party to invoice at all.
The money that does move
- Uruguayan music generated roughly USD 20 million in author and neighbouring rights in 2024, covering plays inside Uruguay and abroad, per AGADU’s balance reported by InfoNegocios in June 2025.
- AGADU runs the “ventanilla única,” a single collection window for music rights, the same architecture the Dominican Republic adopted.
- AGADU has also signed DirecTV Latin America to carry more than 250 Uruguayan productions across seven markets, a deal board member Diego Drexler called “muy potente.”
- Live is institutionalising in parallel, with Ticketmaster entering Uruguay through its acquisition of RED UTS.
Where a Montevideo release actually earns
Spotify’s Uruguay daily chart on 4 August 2026 was led by Quevedo, Anuel AA, Jay Wheeler, Aitana and Omar Courtz. The highest local entry was Lauta’s “Puñaladas” at No. 7.
Domestic chart real estate is mostly imported repertoire, which means the upside for a Uruguayan act is export. Plena and cumbia travel into Argentina and Spain first, and that revenue arrives through recording distribution, not through a CMO cheque. The same export-first pattern shows up in Argentina’s cumbia economy.
Three things to fix before your next release
- Identify who your “producer” is under Decreto 404/023. If you financed and own the master, that party is you, and the statutory remuneration is not a separate cheque you are waiting on.
- Register twice. AGADU covers authorship, SUDEI covers performance. They are different rights and neither one collects the other.
- Get performer credits into your delivery metadata, not just your contract. DDEX means Digital Data Exchange, the messaging standard distributors use to send releases and credits to DSPs, and it is the only place a session player’s name travels at scale.
Uruguay wrote one of Latin America’s more ambitious digital remuneration rights, then handed enforcement to whoever holds the master. That makes ownership and clean splits the practical difference between a right on paper and money in an account.
