SoundExchange, the organisation that collects United States neighbouring rights royalties, signed Kenya’s KAMP Copyright and Related Rights Ltd to two reciprocal agreements this year: one for record companies, agreed in the second half of 2025, and one for performers, agreed in early 2026. Nothing was bought and nothing changed ownership. What changed is that United States neighbouring rights money owed to KAMP-represented Kenyan producers and performers now has, on paper, a route home. SoundExchange announced both agreements together on 9 February 2026, folded into a batch of seventeen new collecting-society partnerships that it said took its total past ninety agreements and its coverage of the available global neighbouring rights market past 91 per cent.
Five months later, Kenya’s own copyright regulator suspended KAMP’s licence to operate as a collective management organisation at all.
A collection mandate, not a catalogue#
It is worth being precise about what a reciprocal representation agreement is, because the language around these deals invites overstatement. SoundExchange does not acquire any Kenyan masters. KAMP does not acquire any American ones. Each organisation is authorised to identify, in its own territory, the money owed to the other side’s members and send it across. For a Kenyan record producer, the practical effect is that if a track gets airplay or streams that trigger a US neighbouring rights payment, SoundExchange can now recognise KAMP as the correct Kenyan collecting society and route the money to it, which then owes the producer a share under Kenyan rules.
That is genuinely useful plumbing. Kenya’s recorded music sector has spent years arguing about who is allowed to collect royalties at all, and an international collecting society deciding KAMP is a legitimate counterparty is a form of external validation that took real diplomatic and administrative work to secure. SoundExchange’s own president, Michael Huppe, framed the wider expansion as ensuring creators are paid “no matter where their music is played.” For KAMP’s members, this agreement was supposed to be evidence that the where now includes Kenya.
The domestic ground shifted under it#
KAMP signed these agreements while already operating under a conditional domestic licence. Kenya currently licenses two organisations to collect neighbouring rights royalties, KAMP and PAVRISK, under a one-year arrangement running to November 2026. The two split collection by sector under a consent agreement dated 16 June 2025: KAMP handles new media and public service vehicles, PAVRISK handles general licensing and broadcast. That consent itself grew out of a separate licensing dispute involving a third body, the Music Copyright Society of Kenya, in the same month.
On 1 July 2026, Kenya’s copyright regulator suspended KAMP’s operating licence for 90 days. The notice, signed by the regulator’s board chairman, alleged that more than five million shillings in distributable royalties, a precise figure of Sh5,514,559.16, had been spent on activities unrelated to paying rights holders rather than distributed to them, language the regulator went so far as to call diversion and embezzlement. It also found KAMP had missed the mandatory rule requiring 70 per cent of collected royalties to reach rights holders, had licensed music users below the regulator’s own approved rates, and had not lived up to commitments made in the June 2025 consent agreement. PAVRISK was ordered to collect in KAMP’s sectors for the duration of the suspension and hold the money in a separate account, released only on the regulator’s written say-so.
KAMP’s response, filed within the week, was blunt: it said it learned of the embezzlement allegation from the public notice itself, that no one had ever asked it to account for the funds beforehand, and that it had not been given a fair hearing.
A tribunal that split its ruling in two#
KAMP took the suspension to Kenya’s Copyright Tribunal, which issued an interim order in late July pausing the suspension while it heard the case properly. Its full ruling, delivered in the second half of August, did two separate things that are easy to conflate but should not be. It found that the regulator had acted within its lawful powers in investigating and suspending a licensed collecting society, which is a real and significant finding in the regulator’s favour. But it also said, in effect, that it was not yet in a position to say whether KAMP had actually done what it was accused of. The tribunal upheld the referee’s right to blow the whistle. It did not uphold the score.
It gave the regulator seven days to conclude the process, one way or the other. The regulator’s answer, delivered at a board meeting eleven days after the ruling, was not a conclusion so much as an escalation: it dissolved KAMP’s entire board, ordered its chief executive suspended, called for fresh elections within 30 days, and referred the Sh5.5 million question to Kenya’s criminal investigators.
Two accounts that do not agree#
Where this stands as of publication is genuinely unclear, and that is the honest headline rather than an inconvenience to smooth over. In early September, KAMP’s own account stated publicly that a further tribunal order at the end of August had lifted the suspension and that its licence remained in force. No notice from the regulator, no tribunal record and no independent report available to this desk confirms an order from that date. The only interim order this desk could verify is the one from late July, and the only substantive judgment is the one from mid-August, the one that split its finding in two. Whether KAMP is, right now, a licensed collecting society in Kenya is a question this desk could not answer from any source it could actually check.
A separate complication is worth flagging precisely because it would be easy to get wrong: KAMP has been here before, once in 2021 when its licence was pulled entirely alongside two other bodies, and again in a 2024 court matter involving PAVRISK. Those are earlier, different episodes. This year’s suspension, tribunal fight and board dissolution are a new sequence, not a continuation of the old one, and conflating them would misstate the record.
What this means for artists#
If you are a Kenyan record producer or performer whose catalogue KAMP represents, the SoundExchange agreement is real and the pipe it builds is real, but a pipe only pays out if something is actually flowing through it at the Kenyan end. For the length of the suspension, that flow runs through PAVRISK’s trust account, not KAMP, and it only leaves that account on the regulator’s written instruction. If you have registered only with KAMP and are counting on its international agreements to eventually produce a payment, check directly with the regulator’s own published notices before assuming the money is coming, rather than relying on KAMP’s own statements about its status. If you have work in both KAMP’s and PAVRISK’s sectors, it is worth confirming which society is actually collecting on your behalf right now, because the sector split that existed in June 2025 is not necessarily the sector split in force today.
More broadly, this is a useful case study in how little an international rights agreement tells you about domestic collection risk. SoundExchange’s due diligence on KAMP as an international counterparty is not, and was never going to be, an assessment of KAMP’s governance as a Kenyan regulator sees it. Two entirely different bodies can reach two entirely different conclusions about the same organisation at the same time, and an artist’s actual money moves according to whichever one currently controls the bank account, not whichever one signed the more prestigious-sounding agreement.
