SAMPRA Closed 2024 Owing R303,662,657 in Unpaid Royalties, 136.1 Per Cent of That Year’s Entire Licence Revenue

SAMPRA, South Africa’s needletime rights collecting society, closed its 2024 financial year holding R 303,662,657 in royalties allocated to members but not yet paid out, a sum equal to 136.1 per cent of that year’s entire licence revenue and 1.72 times what it actually processed and paid to members and sister societies during the year. This is read directly from SAMPRA’s own audited Annual Review 2024, covering the year ended 31 December 2024, and the ratio moves by less than a hundredth of a point under the only measurement uncertainty the report itself allows.

Closing balance of 'Other financial liabilities' (note 11), described by SAMPRA as royalties available for distribution plus cumulative interest on funds invested. Source: SAMPRA Annual Review 2024.

Show the numbers

Financial year to 31 December	Royalties allocated but not yet paid, closing balance, ZAR
FY2024	303.66m
FY2023	298.67m

Source: SAMPRA (South African Music Performance Rights Association NPC), Annual Review 2024, consolidated and separate annual financial statements for the year ended 31 December 2024, audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers Inc., retrieved 23 Aug 2026 · download the data

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What the statements actually say#

SAMPRA administers needletime, meaning public performance and broadcast royalties for sound recordings owed to performers and record companies, not SAMRO’s rights in the underlying songs or CAPASSO’s mechanical rights. In 2024 it collected R 223,119,341 in audited licence fees, almost all of it (99.3 per cent) from two lines: 58.4 per cent from “Communication to the Public” licences, meaning venues, retail, hospitality and streaming platforms other than radio, and 40.9 per cent from radio broadcast. Foreign income collected on its behalf by sister societies abroad was 0.7 per cent.

Against that R223.1 million, the report states SAMPRA “processed and paid” R176.7 million to members and sister collecting management organisations during the year, which is 79.2 per cent of licence revenue collected. The gap is not a one-year lag catching up: the closing balance of royalties allocated but still unpaid, R303.7 million, is larger than the whole of that year’s revenue. Table 1 sets the four numbers next to the two ratios computed from them, plus two sensitivity rows explained below.

Part of the explanation is timing, and the report states it directly. SAMPRA processed its 2023 distribution in September 2024, and intended to process the 2024 distribution in September 2025. So the R176.7 million paid during 2024 discharged the prior year’s allocation, not the current one, and the R303.7 million closing balance includes a 2024 distribution that was scheduled rather than overdue at the reporting date. That does not make the backlog small. The only year-on-year reading this desk can check, FY2023 to FY2024, shows it is not shrinking: licence revenue grew 2.1 per cent and the distributable amount after tax grew 2.4 per cent, while the unpaid royalty balance grew 1.7 per cent, so the stock of unpaid royalties moved in step with the revenue funding it rather than falling behind or catching up. That is one year-on-year reading, not a multi-year trend, and this desk is not calling the backlog structural on two data points; what it can say is that SAMPRA’s two most recently audited years show the same ratio twice, not a single bad year that the next report might correct on its own.

The counter-reading#

Two things would have to be true for the headline ratio to be wrong, and this desk checked both. First, that the figures are themselves imprecise: two of the three inputs, total income and the amount paid out, are stated in SAMPRA’s own prose to R0.1 million rather than audited to the rand, so every ratio built on them carries up to R50,000 of rounding in one term. Taking the paid figure at the top of that rounding band, R 176,750,000, gives a ratio of 1.718; taking it at the bottom, R 176,650,000, gives 1.719. The published 1.72 does not move. Second, that one year is an outlier: the standard test this desk runs on a finding, dropping the largest row and recomputing, is not informative here because the dataset is only two rows, FY2023 and FY2024, and dropping either one just leaves the other with nothing to compare it to. That same two-year record shows FY2023’s unpaid balance was 136.7 per cent of that year’s revenue, barely different from FY2024’s 136.1 per cent, which is the only robustness available from a single collecting society’s two most recent published years, and it points the same way the headline does.

This is one society’s audited statements for one financial year’s reporting period, not an industry-wide measure of royalty collection in South Africa or anywhere else. SAMRO’s performing-rights royalties and CAPASSO’s mechanical royalties are collected and paid on entirely separate accounts this desk has not measured here, and neither is any other African collecting society’s payout timing. Nothing in this piece should be read as a claim about how any other CMO on the continent manages its distributable funds.

What this means for a SAMPRA-registered performer or record company#

Budget for a roughly ten to eleven month lag between the calendar year your recording earned needletime royalties and the distribution that pays them: SAMPRA’s own report states the 2023 year’s money was processed in September 2024, and the 2024 year’s was scheduled for September 2025. Separately, treat the “royalties allocated but not yet paid” figure SAMPRA reports each year as a running stock, not a single year’s float: at R303.7 million against one year’s R223.1 million in revenue, the balance now sitting in that account is worth more than everything SAMPRA collects from licensees in a full year, and it has not shrunk relative to revenue between FY2023 and FY2024. If your own accounting assumes royalties owed to you clear within the year they are earned, SAMPRA’s own numbers say that assumption understates how much is sitting in the pipeline ahead of you at any given time.