SoundExchange Signed Kenya’s KAMP to Reciprocal Rights Agreements in February 2026. Five Months Later, Kenya Suspended KAMP’s Licence to Operate

On 9 February 2026 SoundExchange announced it had signed Kenya’s KAMP Copyright and Related Rights Limited to two reciprocal representation agreements, a rights owner agreement dated to the second half of 2025 and a performer agreement described as “kicking off 2026.” Neither agreement transfers ownership of a single recording. Five months after the announcement, Kenya’s copyright regulator suspended KAMP’s licence to operate as a collective management organisation at all.

What the agreements actually do

A reciprocal representation agreement between two collective management organisations is a collection mandate, not a transfer of rights. SoundExchange collects neighbouring rights royalties in the United States under the statutory section 114 digital performance licence and, under agreements like this one, identifies the share due to a partner society’s members and remits it. KAMP is licensed by the Kenya Copyright Board to collect royalties on behalf of Kenyan record producers. Under the new agreements, each side collects in its own territory on behalf of the other’s rights holders. No master recording changes hands, no catalogue is assigned, and neither organisation acquires any right to exploit a recording it did not already control.

SoundExchange’s own account of the timing splits the relationship into two legs. The rights owner, meaning record company, agreement with KAMP was among a group finalised in the second half of 2025, alongside Barbados’s COSCAP and Paraguay’s SGP. The performer agreement followed in early 2026, alongside Norway’s Gramo. Both legs were folded into a single announcement covering seventeen new CMO agreements in total, which SoundExchange said brought its portfolio past ninety agreements and its coverage of the available global neighbouring rights market past 91 per cent. SoundExchange president and chief executive Michael Huppe was quoted saying the expansion “bolsters our ability to offer premier international neighbouring rights services” and reflects a commitment to ensuring “creators are fairly compensated for their work, no matter where their music is played.”

KAMP’s domestic standing was already conditional when it signed

KAMP did not enter this agreement as an uncontested regulator. Kenya currently licenses two collective management organisations for neighbouring rights, KAMP and PAVRISK, the Performing and Audio-Visual Rights Society of Kenya, under a one-year licence running from 5 November 2025 to 4 November 2026. That licensing sits on top of a consent agreement the two organisations signed on 16 June 2025, which split collection by sector: KAMP collects on PAVRISK’s behalf in the new media and public service vehicle sectors, and PAVRISK collects on KAMP’s behalf in general licensing and broadcast. The consent was itself a condition the Kenya Copyright Board attached after withholding an operating licence from a third body, the Music Copyright Society of Kenya, in June 2025 over an internal leadership dispute. KAMP’s international expansion with SoundExchange therefore landed inside an already-conditional domestic licence, not a settled one.

Five months later, Kenya suspended KAMP’s licence

On 1 July 2026 the Kenya Copyright Board suspended KAMP’s operating licence for 90 days. The notice, signed by board chairman Joshua Kutuny, followed what the Board described as a review of KAMP’s governance, financial management, licensing practices, royalty administration and regulatory compliance. The Board’s stated findings: distributable royalty funds of Sh5,514,559.16 were expended on non-core activities rather than paid to rights holders, which the Board characterised as diverted, misappropriated and embezzled; KAMP failed to meet the mandatory 70:30 royalty distribution principle; KAMP issued licences below gazetted tariffs, depressing collections; KAMP had not implemented or demonstrated compliance with the undertakings in the 16 June 2025 consent agreement with PAVRISK; and the Board cited prolonged litigation funded from royalty income and directors serving beyond their legal tenure. KAMP was ordered to refund the Sh5,514,559.16, submit a corrective action plan, hold lawful board elections, and give the Board unrestricted access to its governance records. PAVRISK was directed to collect royalties in the sectors ordinarily served by KAMP for the duration of the suspension, deposit the proceeds into a separate designated account, and distribute nothing without further written direction from the Board.

KAMP disputed the findings within the week, stating it first learned of the embezzlement allegation through the public notice itself, that the Board had never asked it to account for the funds in any prior correspondence, and that it had not been given a fair hearing before the suspension took effect. KAMP also noted it had already signed a service level agreement for e-Citizen based royalty collection intended to improve transparency.

The tribunal upheld the power to suspend. It did not uphold the facts.

KAMP appealed to Kenya’s Copyright Tribunal. On 30 July 2026 the Tribunal issued an interim order in Nairobi staying implementation of the Board’s suspension pending a full hearing, which meant KAMP’s licence remained operative through most of the 90-day period on paper. The substantive judgment, cited by Kenya’s official law reports as KAMP Copyright and Related Rights Ltd v Kenya Copyright Board & 4 others, is dated 17 August 2026, though several news reports describe it as an 18 August ruling; this record could not resolve the discrepancy because Kenya Law’s own judgment page returned an access error to this desk on every attempt and the text was not read directly. Reporting on the ruling, drawing on quotations attributed to the panel chaired by Elizabeth Lenjo, describes two distinct findings that should not be collapsed into one. First, the Tribunal held that the Board “did not act ultra vires,” meaning supervision, inspection and enquiry into a licensed CMO’s conduct falls within the Board’s statutory mandate, and on that basis the power to suspend was upheld. Second, and separately, the Tribunal is reported to have said it was “not yet in a position to determine whether the organisation had actually committed the breaches cited by KECOBO.” The ruling upheld the regulator’s authority to act. It did not uphold the regulator’s factual findings. The Tribunal directed the Board to conclude its process within seven days of the ruling, either lifting the suspension or taking further action.

The Board escalated instead of concluding

At a special board meeting on 24 August 2026, the Kenya Copyright Board dissolved KAMP’s board of directors, ordering them to vacate office immediately with fresh elections within 30 days, and suspended KAMP chief executive Maurice Okoth. The Board referred the Sh5.5 million question to Kenya’s Directorate of Criminal Investigations. PAVRISK continued collecting in KAMP’s sectors under the same trust-account arrangement ordered on 1 July. KAMP has said it supports lawful regulation and oversight but that a 30-day election timeline is unworkable while the suspension has cut off the association’s main revenue source.

What is not established

KAMP’s own account and the regulator’s account currently diverge on the central question of whether KAMP is licensed to operate at all. On 2 September 2026, KAMP’s account posted publicly that “following the Copyright Tribunal’s interim orders of 31 August 2026, the suspension of KAMP’s CMO licence has been lifted” and that its licence “remains in force.” This desk found no Kenya Copyright Board notice, no Kenya Law record and no independent news report of a Tribunal order dated 31 August 2026. The only interim order this desk could independently confirm is the 30 July 2026 stay, and the only substantive judgment is the one dated 17 August 2026 on Kenya Law’s own citation. Whether a further order was in fact issued on 31 August 2026 is not established one way or the other by any source available to this desk, and the claim is reported here as KAMP’s own statement, not as a confirmed fact.

Separately, this record concerns events of 2026 only. A 2024 High Court matter, Kenya Copyright Board v Kenya Association of Music Producers & another, decided 15 October 2024 by Justice Joe M. Omido, concerned a different licensing dispute involving PAVRISK and should not be read as part of the same sequence.

What this means for artists

For a Kenyan record producer whose masters KAMP represents, the SoundExchange agreement is real but currently sits on top of a domestic collection mechanism that is not functioning as KAMP. Any United States neighbouring rights money SoundExchange identifies as owed to a KAMP-represented catalogue has to land somewhere in Kenya to reach the rights holder, and for the duration of the suspension that somewhere is PAVRISK’s trust account, released only on the Board’s written direction, not on KAMP’s say-so. A producer who has not separately registered with PAVRISK, and who is relying on KAMP’s international agreements to eventually pay out, is currently relying on a domestic pipe that Kenya’s own regulator says is shut and that KAMP says is open. Until the Kenya Copyright Board publishes something that resolves that contradiction, the safest assumption for a rights holder is the regulator’s public notice, not the collecting society’s social media account.

Limits of this record. The KAMP suspension notice and the Board’s administrative action notice are published by the Kenya Copyright Board as scanned PDF documents; this desk confirmed both URLs resolve and both documents exist on the Board’s own site, but could not extract machine-readable text from either, so the specific figures and quoted findings in this record are drawn from named trade press reports that quote the notices directly, cross-checked against each other. The Copyright Tribunal’s judgment of 17 August 2026 was not read in full; Kenya Law’s judgment pages returned an access error to this desk on repeated attempts on 30 September 2026. Corrections to desk@afrobeatswire.com.