On 22 February 2019, in Praia, the Sociedade Cabo-verdiana de Música signed reciprocal representation contracts with three African collecting societies on the same day: UNAC-SA in Angola, SOMAS in Mozambique and SGA in Guinea-Bissau. No catalogue was bought. No rights were assigned. What moved was permission, and permission is the thing that decides whether a Cape Verdean songwriter ever sees money from a bar in Luanda or a radio station in Maputo.
The signings happened at the close of a meeting convened by the World Intellectual Property Organization. WIPO’s own record logs it as WIPO/CCM/RAI/19, the Inter-Regional Meeting for Lusophone Countries on Collective Management and Infrastructure, held in Praia. A fourth instrument was signed the same day, a memorandum of understanding rather than a contract, with a São Tomé and Príncipe society that had not yet finished constituting itself. The day before, SCM had signed a separate reciprocity contract with the Brazilian society ABRAMUS.
What a reciprocity contract actually is#
This is the part that gets reported wrongly more often than any other item in music rights, so it is worth being exact. A reciprocal representation agreement is a mandate. It is not an acquisition, not an assignment, and not a publishing deal.
Under these contracts, SCM does not own anything in Angola, Mozambique or Guinea-Bissau. It does not administer the Angolan repertoire. What it gets is the authority to license UNAC-SA’s repertoire to users inside Cape Verde, to collect the money those users pay, and to account for it back to UNAC-SA. The arrangement runs the other way at the same time, which is what makes it reciprocal: UNAC-SA can license Cape Verdean works to Angolan users, collect in Angola, and remit.
The practical consequence is territorial. A Cape Verdean author’s work is still owned by that author, still represented by SCM at home, and is now also licensable inside three more African markets by a body that has staff and a tariff there. The author gains a collection route, not a new owner.
These three contracts cover public performance only. That is music played in public: bars, restaurants, radio, television, live venues. Mechanical reproduction rights, which cover copying, are not recorded against any of the three. That distinction matters because it marks the edge of what these agreements can collect.
What SCM’s own schedule shows#
SCM publishes a signed document listing every international agreement it holds, titled “Acordos de representação SCM com entidades internacionais”. It is the most useful thing any African collecting society has put in public about its own reach, and it is worth reading closely.
The schedule records 42 representation agreements with 37 sister societies. Thirty-nine are reciprocal and three are unilateral. All 42 cover public performance, while only 20 also cover mechanical rights. By region, Europe accounts for 17 agreements and Africa for 14, which together make up 80 per cent of the network. The schedule’s own total: 30,199,981 works and 1,103,216 rightsholders that SCM is authorised to represent.
Against the three societies that signed in Praia, the schedule records the following. UNAC in Angola: reciprocal, public performance, 400,000 works, 5,820 rightsholders. SOMAS in Mozambique: reciprocal, public performance, with a figure that reads either as 578 works and 943 rightsholders or as the single number 578,943, because the document’s own column layout does not resolve which. SGA in Guinea-Bissau: reciprocal, public performance, with both the works column and the rightsholders column left completely empty.
That empty row is the most interesting line in the document. The Guinea-Bissau contract exists, SCM lists it as live, and SCM’s own register of what it is worth records nothing at all behind it. The document offers no explanation, and no other source read here supplies one. SGA has no institutional website, which closes off the obvious place to check.
Where the documents disagree#
Three conflicts are worth stating plainly rather than tidying away.
The meeting dates do not match. The Portuguese authors’ society SPA, which attended at WIPO’s invitation and published the fullest account of the signings, places the Praia meeting from 19 to 22 February. WIPO’s own meeting record gives 21 to 22 February 2019. The 22 February signing date is common to both and is not in dispute. Only the start date is, and WIPO’s record covers a two-day meeting, so SPA’s longer span may well be covering more than one event. Nothing read here settles it.
SCM’s own numbers for South Africa do not match each other. Three months after Praia, SCM signed a reciprocity contract with SAMRO in Johannesburg, and Cape Verdean reporting at the time said it gave SCM a catalogue of more than 2 million musical works. SCM’s own schedule records SAMRO at 543,225 works. The schedule carries no date, so it is not possible to say whether the figure fell, whether the earlier number was wrong, or whether the two are counting different things.
The schedule itself is not a clean register. It lists a city, Ouagadougou, in the country column for its Burkinabè counterparty BBDA. It leaves one of the 42 rows with no entity name at all, identified only as “CHINA”. And it is undated, which limits how far any figure in it can be pushed.
The scale problem#
Reciprocity is only worth what the collecting machinery behind it can actually bring in, and here the numbers are sobering. SCM’s own distribution report for 2021 put the total it distributed in author’s and neighbouring rights at 9,523,045 escudos for the year, across every member and every right. SCM was constituted in 2013, is CISAC member number 299, and runs its distribution on WIPO Connect, the software WIPO funds and supplies to smaller societies.
SCM also had to build its domestic licensing base from close to nothing. Its Copyright Friendly Label scheme, which licenses bars and venues individually, dates only to 2019, the same year as the Praia signings. A network authorised to represent 30 million works means very little if the body holding it can only invoice a few hundred premises at home.
What this means for artists#
If you are a Cape Verdean author, these contracts are the mechanism by which money from outside Cape Verde can legitimately reach you without you signing anything new. SCM’s own schedule gives Sara Tavares and Dino d’Santiago as examples of the kind of repertoire that travels, and the point generalises: the moment your work is played in a territory where your society has a reciprocal partner, there is a legal route for the collection to come home.
Three cautions follow from the documents, not from theory. First, these three contracts cover public performance only, so a stream, a sync or a physical copy in those markets is not inside them. Second, a signed agreement is not a payment. Nothing read here shows money actually flowing in either direction under any of the three, and the Guinea-Bissau row suggests the relationship may be formal rather than operational. Third, reciprocity does not change who owns your work. If you want to know who controls your copyright, the answer is still found in your publishing and recording agreements, not in the list of societies your society shakes hands with.
For artists in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau, the contracts run the same way in reverse, and the same cautions apply.
What could not be established#
No consideration of any kind is disclosed for these contracts: no fee, no advance, no commission rate, no administration deduction. Societies commonly exchange mandates rather than cash, but no document read here says that about these three, so nothing is assumed. No source names the individuals who signed, on any side. No term, renewal date or termination provision was found. None of UNAC-SA, SOMAS or SGA published an account of the signings that could be fetched, so this record rests on the Cape Verdean and Portuguese side of the transaction. A fifth African reciprocity agreement, with Benin’s BUBEDRA, appears in the same SCM schedule covering both public performance and mechanicals, but it carries no date and could not be tied to this or any other signing.
