TikTok’s 2021 Licensing Deal With SAMRO and CAPASSO Reaches Composers in 58 African Territories. No Source Shows a Matching Deal for the People Who Recorded the Songs.

On 6 April 2021, TikTok signed a multi-year licensing agreement with South Africa’s Southern African Music Rights Organisation (SAMRO) and the Composers, Authors and Publishers Association (CAPASSO). The deal covers public performance and mechanical reproduction of musical compositions, the songwriting and publishing side of copyright. Through CAPASSO’s reciprocal arrangements with 21 other African collective management organisations, the licence reaches repertoire in 58 territories beyond South Africa itself. No source checked for this record shows a matching TikTok agreement with South Africa’s neighbouring-rights society, SAMPRA, which represents performers and record companies. The people who wrote a song used on TikTok have a documented path to payment. The people who performed and recorded it do not, on the evidence available.

What TikTok actually licensed

SAMRO and CAPASSO are not the same kind of organisation, and the distinction is the whole story. SAMRO, founded in 1961, is South Africa’s performing rights organisation: it licenses the public performance of musical works and pays the composers, authors and publishers who wrote them. CAPASSO, formed in 2014 from a merger of SAMRO’s mechanical rights division and NORM, the National Organisation of Reproduction Rights in Music, licenses the reproduction and digital use of those same compositions, mechanical and streaming royalties rather than performance royalties. Both sit on the composition side of copyright. Neither owns, administers or collects for the sound recording itself, the performance captured on tape, or the company that financed and released it.

TikTok’s own description of the deal, given by Jordan Lowy, the platform’s Head of Music Publishing Licensing and Partnerships, names that side explicitly: the agreement exists “ensuring that songwriters, composers and publishers across Africa can benefit when their music is used on TikTok.” CAPASSO’s chief operations officer, named by CAPASSO itself as Wiseman Ngubo and identified with the fuller name Wiseman Qinani Ngubo in Music In Africa’s independent report on the same announcement, echoed the same framing, welcoming the deal as a way to ensure “pan-African songwriters are taken care of on the platform.” Every account of the announcement, from CAPASSO’s own site to five independent trade outlets, describes composers and publishers as the beneficiaries. None mentions performers, session musicians or record companies.

How one signature reaches 58 territories

CAPASSO’s reach outside South Africa comes from an internal mechanism, not from TikTok signing anyone else. Since 2018, when CAPASSO presented a digital licensing strategy to CISAC’s Regional African Committee in Abidjan and the strategy was adopted, the organisation has built what it calls the CAPASSO Hub: a network of reciprocal representation agreements with other African collecting societies, under which CAPASSO becomes the single point of contact a digital platform needs to clear repertoire across the continent, rather than that platform negotiating with each national society separately. At the time of the TikTok deal, the Hub covered repertoire from 21 collective management organisations across 58 African territories; CAPASSO’s own chief executive, Jotam Matariro, has since described the network as having grown to 25 societies.

That structure means TikTok has one commercial relationship, with CAPASSO and SAMRO in Johannesburg, and CAPASSO in turn has separate standing agreements with the other 21 societies that predate the TikTok deal and are not specific to it. A songwriter in Kenya or Ghana whose work is used on TikTok is paid, if at all, because their national society has a reciprocal agreement with CAPASSO, not because TikTok has any direct relationship with that songwriter, their publisher or their home society. Nothing in the announcement, or in any of the five accounts of it checked for this record, discloses a royalty rate, a minimum guarantee or any other financial term.

What is not established

Nowhere in CAPASSO’s own account of the deal, in TikTok’s quoted statement, or in contemporaneous trade coverage from Music Business Worldwide, Music Week, Music In Africa and Digital Music News, does the word “SAMPRA” appear. SAMPRA, the South African Music Performance Rights Association, is the country’s needletime and neighbouring-rights collecting society: it represents recording artists, session musicians and record companies, and collects royalties when a sound recording, as distinct from the composition underlying it, is broadcast or publicly performed. A search of SAMPRA’s own public statements and of trade press covering SAMPRA’s deal activity turns up no TikTok agreement at all. SAMPRA’s most recent documented reciprocal deal is with SoundExchange in the United States, announced 18 November 2024, a separate agreement with a separate counterparty for a separate right, already recorded on this site.

That absence does not prove no such deal exists; a private arrangement between TikTok and SAMPRA, or between TikTok and South African record labels directly, could exist without having been announced. What this record establishes is narrower and still worth stating plainly: no source checked, including SAMPRA’s own public communications, documents a TikTok licence for recorded performances in South Africa or anywhere else on the continent. South African needletime royalties are also statutorily rate-regulated under section 9A of the Copyright Act, which requires SAMPRA to negotiate rates with users rather than set them unilaterally, a structural reason a SAMPRA deal, if one exists, would look different from the CAPASSO Hub model in any case.

What this means for artists

If you wrote a song that gets used on TikTok anywhere SAMRO, CAPASSO or one of CAPASSO’s 21 (now reportedly 25) partner societies operates, there is a documented, named mechanism that is supposed to route a performance and mechanical royalty back to you, provided you are a registered member of your national society and that society holds a reciprocal agreement with CAPASSO. Registration is the condition that does the most damage when skipped: CAPASSO and SAMRO license jointly but are separate organisations with separate membership, and an artist registered with only one of them is not fully covered.

If you are a performer, a session musician, or you run a label whose masters get used on TikTok, this deal does not apply to you at all, and this record found no evidence any comparable deal does either. The money TikTok pays under this agreement goes to songwriters and publishers through SAMRO and CAPASSO’s channel. It does not reach the performer or the rights holder in the recording through any mechanism this record could verify. An artist who both wrote and performed a song gets paid on the composition side and should not assume, from this deal alone, that the recording side is also covered.

Limits of this record. Confirmed from a named party’s own site: CAPASSO’s blog post dated 25 June 2021, archiving the original announcement text, resolves at HTTP 200 and names the 6 April 2021 date, the 58-territory and 21-society figures, and the quotes from Jordan Lowy and from CAPASSO’s chief operations officer, named there as Wiseman Ngubo, used above. Corroborated independently by Music Business Worldwide, Music Week and Music In Africa, each resolving at HTTP 200, each using the same figures and quotes, none adding a financial term the others omit; Music In Africa’s account is the only one of the three checked that gives his fuller name, Wiseman Qinani Ngubo, the form used in the body text above. The CAPASSO Hub’s growth to 25 member societies and its 2018 Abidjan origin are drawn from a Music In Africa interview with CAPASSO chief executive Jotam Matariro and from CISAC’s own newsroom account of its 2018 Regional African Committee, not from the TikTok announcement itself, and are given here as background on how the mechanism works rather than as terms of the TikTok deal. The absence of a TikTok-SAMPRA deal is reported as an absence of evidence found by this desk across CAPASSO’s own communications, SAMPRA’s public statements and the trade press covering both organisations as of October 2026, not as proof that no private arrangement exists. No source consulted discloses a royalty rate or minimum guarantee under the SAMRO/CAPASSO agreement. Corrections to desk@afrobeatswire.com.

Correction, 5 October 2026: an earlier version of this record attributed the name “Wiseman Qinani Ngubo” to CAPASSO’s own blog post without qualification. CAPASSO’s blog names him only as “Wiseman Ngubo”; the fuller form comes from Music In Africa’s independent report on the same announcement, which is now credited above. The person and the quote are unchanged; only the sourcing of the middle name has been corrected.