Uzbekistan is one of the few countries where working as a professional singer requires a state licence.
The licence is issued through Uzbekconcert, a State Unitary Enterprise. On 22 May 2025, the Ministry of Justice said it had referred 10 performers to Uzbekconcert with a recommendation that their licences be cancelled, following complaints from poets and composers and administrative court rulings on copyright violations.
The ministry called infringement by a licensed performer a gross violation of licensing requirements, and told rights holders to report cases through the 1008 helpline.
A year later, the tax filings from that same licensed population arrived. They are small.
What 1,100 licensed singers declared
Between 1 January 2025 and 1 May 2026, 1,100 licensed singers filed income declarations with Uzbekistan’s Tax Committee, reported by Zamin.uz on 3 May 2026.
- Total declared income: 6.478 billion soums. At the roughly 12,019 soums to the dollar quoted in early August 2026, that is about 539,000 dollars for the entire licensed profession over 16 months.
- Taxable portion: 5.1 billion soums. Income tax assessed: 599.7 million soums, due 1 June 2026.
- 375 singers declared under 1 million soums. Another 576 declared between 1 and 10 million.
- Only 7 licensed artists declared more than 150 million soums for the year.
Minister of Culture Ozodbek Nazarbekov told artists that one should be ashamed to suggest not paying taxes. A new taxation procedure for concert and entertainment activity has been proposed to take effect on 1 September 2026, three weeks from now.
The rail the licence does not touch
A Uzbekconcert licence governs performance activity. It is not a recording royalty system, and it does not deliver a track to a streaming service.
Collective management sits elsewhere. SIIP, the Chamber for the Protection of Copyrights of Artists, Creators and Performers, was established on 28 January 2021. Uzbekistan acceded to the Rome Convention on performers and phonogram producers in June 2024, per Kosta Legal. The neighbouring rights framework is barely two years old.
Spotify only reached Uzbekistan in February 2021, in the 80-market expansion covered by Novastan. Before that, listeners used Apple Music, Deezer, Yandex Music and BOOM.
The export picture is thin, and it is classical
Music Metrics Vault tracks 22 Uzbek artists on Spotify. The top of that list is not pop.
- Eldar Nebolsin, pianist: about 179,000 monthly listeners.
- Dj Piligrim: about 177,000.
- Behzod Abduraimov, pianist: about 120,000.
- Sogdiana: about 88,000.
Abduraimov was born in Tashkent in 1990 and was signed by Decca Classics, a Universal Music company, after winning the London International Piano Competition in 2009. His catalogue money is collected in London, not Tashkent.
Compare the neighbour. Kazakhstan’s biggest streaming act is Eternxlkz, the phonk producer Nurbek Myssiyev, at over 4 million monthly listeners. No performance licence created that. We covered how Kazakhstan routed its publishing money through a state platform, and the same gap between domestic collection and export streaming runs through Mongolia.
What Uzbek artists should do before 1 September
- Treat the licence and the recording as two separate assets. The licence lets you perform. It does not register or monetise the master.
- Get identifiers on every release. ISRC means International Standard Recording Code, the per-track ID that lets a DSP match a stream to a payee. UPC means Universal Product Code, the release-level equivalent.
- Deliver through a DDEX-native distributor. DDEX means Digital Data Exchange, the metadata standard the major services ingest. Bad metadata is the most common reason Central Asian releases go unmatched.
- Cover the platforms that actually have Uzbek listeners: Yandex Music, Zvuk and VK Music alongside Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube. Most Western-facing distributors ship only the second group.
- Keep the royalty statement separate from the tax declaration. Under the September procedure, one is evidence for the other, and a per-DSP breakdown is easier to defend than a lump sum.
Uzbekistan measures its music industry by counting licences. That number tells you how many people are allowed to sing in a hall. It tells you nothing about who owns a master or where a stream pays out. For a country of 37 million with 22 tracked artists on Spotify, the second question is the one worth answering. Our Central Asia YouTube monetisation guide covers the adjacent piece.
