SAMRO Owed 3.07 Times What It Paid Out in FY2025, Up From 2.68 a Year Earlier. SAMPRA’s Same Ratio Held Flat at 1.72

SAMRO closed its FY2025 (year ended 30 June 2025) owing R 1,286,855,000 in royalty distributions payable and in progress, 3.07 times the R 419,718,000 it actually paid out in cash that year, up from 2.68 times a year earlier. SAMPRA, South Africa’s other major collector, closed FY2024 (year ended 31 December 2024) owing R 303,662,657, 1.72 times what it paid out, a ratio that has barely moved from FY2023. Both of South Africa’s two largest music rights collectors are sitting on more than a year of payout in unpaid royalties. Only one of them is getting worse.

Distributions payable and in progress, divided by total company licence revenue for the same financial year (ended 30 June). Source: SAMRO Integrated Report 2025.

Show the numbers

Financial year to 30 June	Distributions payable as % of one year's licence revenue
FY2025	189.10
FY2024	168.30

Source: SAMRO (Southern African Music Rights Organisation NPC) Integrated Report 2025, audited summary consolidated annual financial statements for the year ended 30 June 2025, audited by SizweNtsalubaGobodo Grant Thornton Inc., retrieved 22 Aug 2026 · download the data

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What moved, and what did not#

SAMRO’s payable balance did not grow because it is licensing more music. Total company licence revenue was essentially flat, R 683,843,000 in FY2024 against R 680,350,000 in FY2025. What changed is the other side of the ledger: the amount SAMRO actually paid out in cash to members and affiliated sister societies fell 2.2 per cent, from R 429,153,000 to R 419,718,000, while the balance sitting unpaid at year end rose 11.8 per cent, from R 1,150,569,000 to R 1,286,855,000. SAMRO converted 69.0 per cent of the year’s newly accrued royalties into cash payments in FY2024; in FY2025 that conversion rate fell to 66.6 per cent. Cash and cash equivalents on hand, R 837,405,000 at FY2025 close, cover 65.1 per cent of the payable balance, down from 66.3 per cent cover a year earlier. Every one of these is a small move in the same direction: less converted to cash, more held back, less cover for what is owed.

SAMPRA’s picture, by contrast, is closer to flat. Its unpaid royalty balance rose only 1.7 per cent year on year, from R 298,672,348 to R 303,662,657, in line with a licence-revenue increase from R 218,464,977 to R 223,119,341, so the balance’s share of revenue actually eased slightly, from 136.7 to 136.1 per cent. Read alongside the report’s own timing note, SAMPRA’s 2024 distribution was scheduled for September 2025, so part of the closing balance was not yet due rather than overdue at the reporting date. SAMRO’s report carries no equivalent scheduling note for its own balance, so this desk cannot say how much of SAMRO’s payable figure is scheduled rather than overdue either, and does not claim to know.

The counter-reading#

Two organisations is a comparison, not a sample, and this desk’s own robustness check on the combined percentage-point movement shows exactly how much of the “both collectors, one deteriorating” claim rests on SAMRO alone.

Drop SAMRO from the two-collector change figure and the combined percentage-point movement falls from 20.2 to -0.6, a 103.0 per cent swing: SAMRO is not a large contributor to this finding, it is the entire finding. SAMPRA’s own change, -0.6 percentage points, is close enough to zero that this desk reads it as flat rather than as an improvement. The same test on the balance-to-payout multiple, a differently built figure with SAMPRA contributing one data point and SAMRO two, shows the same shape: dropping the single largest row, SAMRO’s FY2025 multiple, still leaves a mean of 2.20 across the remaining two, above SAMPRA’s 1.72 on its own.

The limits that do not go away#

Two figures per collector, not a series: SAMRO’s two-year comparison and SAMPRA’s own two-year revenue-share comparison each rest on the most recent two audited financial years that organisation has published, and neither is long enough to call a trend on its own. The two collectors measure different rights (SAMRO: performing rights in musical works; SAMPRA: needletime and other neighbouring rights in sound recordings) and report on different financial year ends (SAMRO: 30 June; SAMPRA: 31 December), so “FY2025” and “FY2024” in this piece are not the same twelve months for the two organisations. SAMPRA’s Annual Review states its royalties-paid figure to R0.1m in prose rather than to the rand in an audited line, so SAMPRA’s multiple, 1.72, carries more rounding imprecision than SAMRO’s two multiples, which are built entirely from figures audited to the rand. “Payable” and “unpaid” are balance-sheet figures at a reporting date, not a measure of how overdue any individual songwriter’s or performer’s royalty is; SAMPRA’s own report explicitly times part of its balance to a scheduled distribution rather than an overdue one, and this desk has not been able to make the equivalent check for SAMRO.

What this means for a songwriter, performer or publisher#

If you are affiliated with SAMRO, the queue you are in is measurably longer than it was a year ago and the organisation converted a smaller share of new accruals into cash in FY2025 than in FY2024, 66.6 per cent against 69.0 per cent. That is a reason to ask SAMRO directly when your specific accrual is expected to convert to cash, rather than to assume the timeline that applied last year still applies. If you are affiliated with SAMPRA, the equivalent balance has not moved by much in the two years this desk can measure, and part of what looks unpaid may simply be scheduled ahead rather than stuck. Neither collector’s balance sheet tells you when your own royalty clears; both tell you that “distributable” and “distributed” are not the same word, and the gap between them grew at one collector and held at the other.