Malawi’s copyright collecting society told two of the country’s record labels, in a meeting this August, that a 20% deduction showing up on artists’ royalty statements as “Administration Fee” was a mistake: the label was wrong, the money is actually statutory withholding tax, and future statements would be corrected. That account comes from the Copyright Society of Malawi, known as COSOMA, in coverage by two independent Malawian outlets of the same meeting. In the same window of reporting, COSOMA’s own Executive Director, Dora Makwinja, is quoted directly describing the identical 20% a different way: as money that “comes to Cosoma for the management and administration” of the levy, not as tax passed through to the Malawi Revenue Authority. Neither COSOMA nor anyone else has reconciled the two accounts.
The money at stake is Malawi’s Blank Media Levy, a statutory fee introduced in 2011 and charged on blank recording media such as CDs, DVDs and other storage devices, designed to compensate musicians, filmmakers and writers for private copying of their work. COSOMA, a parastatal body established in 1992, is the sole organisation licensed to collect it. This year it collected approximately K3 billion. What happens to that money after collection, and specifically what COSOMA itself keeps from it, is the question two Lilongwe companies, Akometsi Limited and Madness Entertainment, pushed COSOMA to answer in a meeting reported on 4 and 5 August 2026.
What the figures say, and where they stop adding up#
According to Malawian outlet Malawi24, COSOMA’s own reported breakdown of the K3 billion collected runs as follows: K150 million, or 5%, to the Malawi Revenue Authority as an administration fee; a further K150 million, or 5%, to government through the Ministry of Finance; K300 million, or 10%, into a Copyright Fund; and K1.8 billion, or 60%, earmarked for rights holders, meaning the artists, labels and other creators the levy exists to pay. Add those four figures and they come to K2.4 billion, not the K3 billion COSOMA says it collected. No outlet this desk read accounts for the missing K600 million, and no party has been asked to explain it on the record.
That is before a second deduction. From the K1.8 billion set aside for rights holders, COSOMA takes a further 20%, about K360 million, which it has called withholding tax. That leaves roughly K1.44 billion actually reaching artists and labels, a figure Akometsi’s Kelvin Sulugwe calculated, in comments reported by Times of Malawi, as about 48% of the full K3 billion pool. In other words, on the numbers COSOMA itself has supplied to the press, fewer than half of every kwacha collected under a levy built specifically to pay rights holders ends up with them.
One deduction, two explanations#
The dispute that brought Akometsi and Madness Entertainment to COSOMA’s offices was not, at first, about the size of that 20% cut. It was about what COSOMA called it. Royalty statements issued to rights holders had labelled the deduction “Administration Fee,” language that reads as a charge COSOMA keeps for running the scheme. Represented by lawyers Henry Mvula and Ntchindi Chiyamwaka, the two companies pressed COSOMA on the discrepancy at a nearly four-hour meeting in Lilongwe on or around 3 August 2026, after an earlier attempt to raise the same concerns on 30 July had failed when Makwinja was unreachable in Blantyre.
COSOMA’s answer, as reported by both The Maravi Post and Times of Malawi, was that the “Administration Fee” label was a system error. The deduction, COSOMA said, is statutory withholding tax, the kind any payer in Malawi is legally required to deduct and remit to the tax authority, not an extra charge COSOMA itself pockets. The society said it would correct the wording on future statements.
That would be a tidy resolution if it were the only account on the record. It is not. Times of Malawi’s own report of the same meeting quotes Makwinja describing the split in her own words: “Sixty [percent] is distributed to rights holders and 20 percent is what comes to Cosoma for the management and administration.” Read plainly, that is COSOMA’s chief executive calling the 20% COSOMA’s own management and administration income, the opposite of a tax remittance that passes through COSOMA’s books to the Malawi Revenue Authority. The same article, elsewhere, carries the “it’s actually tax, we mislabelled it” explanation. Afrobeats Wire checked COSOMA’s own website directly for a clarifying statement; cosoma.mw returned an HTTP 403 bot-wall response on every page attempted, including its about and Blank Media Levy sections, so no on-the-record COSOMA statement could be verified independently of the two outlets’ reporting. The contradiction between COSOMA’s “system error” explanation and its own director’s quoted description of the same 20% stands unresolved in the public record as of this writing.
A second, older complaint: what the money is counted against#
Underneath the fee-label dispute sits a longer-running disagreement over how COSOMA decides who gets paid at all. COSOMA has told creative-industry managers that Blank Media Levy distribution is not based on digital consumption, streaming, downloads or YouTube views. It is based entirely on data submitted by licensed CD and DVD burning centres, businesses that record what customers ask to have copied onto physical media. COSOMA says it proposed moving to a digital-data model; its own membership rejected the idea at an Annual General Meeting. For an industry where most listening now happens on phones rather than burned discs, artists and managers argue the burning-centre data no longer reflects who is actually being played, which in turn determines who gets paid from the levy and how much.
Separately, a Malawian royalty-data company called MMC Publishing has offered COSOMA a broadcast-monitoring system it says could make airplay reporting more auditable. That proposal addresses a different revenue stream, performance royalties from radio and television airplay, not the Blank Media Levy at the centre of the Akometsi and Madness Entertainment dispute, and COSOMA has not said whether it has taken MMC up on the offer.
What this means for artists#
For a Malawian musician whose royalty statement shows a 20% “Administration Fee,” the practical question is simple: is that money going to COSOMA, or is it going to the government as tax? COSOMA’s own public record currently answers that question both ways in the same week, from the same organisation, with its own executive director’s quoted words pointing one way and its official clarification pointing the other. Until that is resolved and reflected consistently on actual statements, rights holders have no way to independently check whether the deduction they are seeing is a tax they would owe regardless of who collected their royalties, or a fee specific to COSOMA’s operation of the levy. Artists who rely on the Blank Media Levy, rather than streaming royalties or sync income, are the ones most exposed, since this levy is one of the few consistent payouts many of them see at all. The underlying data method, CD and DVD burning-centre logs rather than any measure of digital listening, is a separate problem that predates this fee dispute and was not solved by COSOMA’s August clarification. Afrobeats Wire found no report of either issue being resolved, and no corrected statement, as of 3 November 2026.
