Gabon’s copyright office has hired an Ivorian technology company to find out how much of its own repertoire is actually being played, and where. On 30 April 2026, the Bureau gabonais du droit d’auteur et des droits voisins (BUGADA) signed a partnership with General Management Corporation, the Abidjan-based firm known as GMC-SA, to install audio-recognition beacons in bars, restaurants, hotels and event venues across Libreville. Five weeks later, Gabon’s own culture minister stood up and said that, as things stand, only 14 artists are actually registered with BUGADA to receive anything the new system finds.
That is the deal in outline: a data-monitoring contract between a state copyright body and a private vendor, not a rights transfer of any kind. No composition changes hands, no master recording is licensed, and no party acquires anything resembling ownership. What BUGADA bought, or at least agreed to pilot, is better information about its own collection base. What its minister then admitted, weeks later and in the same breath as promoting the deal, is that the collection base itself is tiny and that artists do not trust the institution meant to pay them.
What was signed, and by whom#
According to Gabonmediatime’s account of the signing, which took place in Abidjan, the agreement was concluded between BUGADA’s director general, Gildas Borrys Ndong Nang, and GMC-SA’s president, Salif Traoré, the Ivorian musician better known as A’Salfo, lead singer of Magic System. A separate account, published by TheGabon, covers the same partnership but names different officials present, Gabon’s minister of culture, Paul Ulrich Kessany, and minister of tourism, Pr Marcelle Ibinga-Itsitsa, without mentioning Ndong Nang or Traoré at all. Neither institution’s own website resolves this. BUGADA’s site, bugada.ga, is a JavaScript application that returns only a page title and meta description on direct fetch, no retrievable press content; GMC-SA’s site, gmc-sa.info, did not resolve at all when checked directly. This record rests on trade and national press, not on either party’s own statement.
What the two sides agreed to, per Gabonreview’s 11 May 2026 account, is a seven-week pilot in Libreville. GMC-SA’s system places audio-detection beacons in participating venues; each one matches what’s playing against a reference database and logs the track, the venue, the date and the time. BUGADA says the aim is to replace venue operators’ own, often approximate, declarations of what they played with something closer to an actual record, and ultimately to feed that data into how royalties are distributed. GMC-SA covers deployment, data processing, dashboards and the final evaluation report; BUGADA covers the pilot’s technical and logistical costs. Beyond that division of labour, no source names a contract value, a fee GMC-SA is paid, a revenue share, or a duration past the seven weeks. Whether the pilot has produced a report, or whether Libreville is getting a permanent system, is not something any source checked for this piece has addressed since.
The company behind the beacons#
GMC-SA is not new to this. Its first deal of this kind, per IBS News and an independent AfricaRadio account, was with Burkina Faso’s Bureau burkinabè du droit d’auteur (BBDA), signed on 17 May 2024 at the FEMUA16 festival in Abidjan, the same event A’Salfo has run for years as commissioner-general. AfricaRadio’s coverage names BBDA’s then director general, Patrick Léga, and an engineer, Cheick Sylla, as party to that signing, and reports that the bureaus of Benin and Senegal were floated as likely next adopters, something no source has since confirmed happened. GMC-SA’s device has also reached Togo’s collecting society, BUTODRA, per a demonstration reported in Togolese coverage, with the same stated purpose: automatically feeding broadcast data to the society’s own server.
Gabon is therefore GMC-SA’s third documented market in roughly two years, each one a national monopoly copyright body signing with the same Ivorian vendor for the same kind of service, on terms that no source has made public in any of the three countries.
The company’s own legal footprint is thin on the record. Côte d’Ivoire’s official legal-notices gazette shows General Management Corporation was incorporated as a société anonyme on 7 April 2023, with articles of association executed three weeks earlier, and a registered capital of 100 million FCFA, a little under $165,000 at current rates. The filing names no individual shareholders or directors; A’Salfo’s role as president comes entirely from press coverage of the deals themselves, not from the company’s own disclosure. Nothing read for this piece establishes whether he holds equity in GMC-SA or serves purely as its public face.
The number that undercuts the pitch#
The more uncomfortable finding sits inside BUGADA’s own numbers, not GMC-SA’s. On 2 April 2025, per Gabonactu, BUGADA paid 613 people, 456 of its own members and 157 other registered claimants, its first distribution since 2018, funded partly by a 70 million FCFA endowment from Gabon’s transition president and partly by 32.85 million FCFA in royalties actually collected that year. Then, on 5 June 2026, a little over a month after the GMC-SA signing, culture minister Paul Ulrich Kessany said publicly that only 14 “acteurs culturels” are currently registered with BUGADA, and used the word “crisis” to describe artists’ confidence in the institution. He framed the GMC-SA data as the fix: usage-based payouts to replace flat ones, in his words, “celui qui est le plus écouté recevra davantage que les autres,” whoever is played most will receive more than the others.
No source read for this piece reconciles 613 with 14. They may describe different things, a one-off payment roll including non-members against a narrower current-membership count, but no document says so, and the minister offered the 14 figure as a plain statement of where BUGADA stands today, in the same appearance where he was selling the new monitoring partnership as the answer. A reader is left with a state copyright office that, by its own minister’s account, serves a strikingly small number of artists, buying better data about a repertoire whose actual beneficiary base it has not itself kept straight.
What this means for artists#
Better broadcast monitoring is, on its face, a genuine improvement over an operator filling in a paper log of what played in their bar last month. If GMC-SA’s beacons work as described, Gabonese artists whose music gets real airplay in Libreville’s venues should, in principle, see that reflected in what BUGADA eventually pays out, rather than an equal split regardless of who got played. That is the theory behind every one of GMC-SA’s three documented deals.
But better data only changes anything if it reaches a distribution system that already works, and BUGADA’s own public record, by its own minister’s telling, suggests that system is thin: fourteen registered artists, a seven-year gap between payment rounds before 2025, and no disclosed fee structure for a vendor contract an artist cannot currently see the terms of. An artist in Libreville has no way, from anything published so far, to know what GMC-SA is being paid, how long its contract runs, or whether the pilot in their own neighbourhood bar produced a report anyone acted on. Until one of the parties publishes that, more accurate tracking of who gets played is not the same thing as more reliable payment to the people who got played.
