SAMRO’s Cost-to-Income Ratio Fell 7.5 Points in a Decade. It Took Six Years Just to Get Back to Where It Started

SAMRO’s cost-to-income ratio fell from 29.1% in 2016 to 21.6% in 2025, a 7.5-point improvement the collecting society’s own Integrated Report frames as a steady decade of gains. It was not steady. The ratio rose first, to a decade high of 40.0% in 2018, and it took until 2022, six years in, before South Africa’s largest performing-rights society brought the cost of collecting and distributing a rand of licence revenue back below where it stood when the decade began.

Financial years to 30 June. Source: SAMRO Integrated Report 2025.

Show the numbers

Financial year to 30 June	Cost-to-income ratio, %
2,018	40
2,017	38.60
2,019	32
2,020	31.40
2,021	29.30
2,016	29.10
2,022	25.90
2,023	25
2,024	22.90
2,025	21.60

Source: SAMRO (Southern African Music Rights Organisation NPC) Integrated Report 2025, ten-year cost-to-income ratio series, Chief Financial Officer's review, retrieved 22 Aug 2026 · download the data

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Not all ten points carry the same certainty. Three are stated in the report’s own prose: FY2024 (22.9%) and FY2025 (21.6%) are both written out, and FY2016 (29.1%) is fixed by the Chief Financial Officer’s statement that the ratio improved 7.5 percentage points over the decade. The other seven years, FY2017 to FY2023, are read off the axis of a chart in the report rather than restated in words or in the summary financial statements, so this desk carries them at medium confidence. The shape of the finding, a spike followed by a recovery, does not depend on any single one of those seven being exact to a tenth of a point; it depends on the spike being real and roughly where the chart puts it, and on the two stated endpoints, FY2016 at 29.1% and FY2025 at 21.6%, which are not chart reads and are not in dispute.

The cost-to-income ratio is SAMRO’s own measure of how much of a rand in licence revenue is consumed by running the organisation, administering licences and distributing royalties, before that rand ever reaches a songwriter or publisher. A lower number means more of each rand collected survives to be paid out. SAMRO’s stated target is 18% by 2028, a further 3.6 points below the FY2025 figure.

The path matters because the endpoints alone flatter the middle. Between FY2016 and FY2018 the ratio worsened by 10.9 points, from 29.1% to 40.0%, before three consecutive years of improvement brought it to a chart-read 29.3% in FY2021, still fractionally above the FY2016 starting line on that reading. Only from FY2022 (25.9%, also chart-read) does the series clear 29.1% with room to spare, so this desk puts the return to the FY2016 level at FY2022, not earlier. The genuine, uninterrupted decline covers four years, FY2022 to FY2025, not ten.

The two years this desk can price in rand tell the same story from a different angle. SAMRO’s audited company licence revenue fell slightly, from R 683,843,000 in FY2024 to R 680,350,000 in FY2025, a decline of 0.5%. Applying each year’s stated cost-to-income ratio to that revenue implies operating cost fell from roughly R156.6 million to roughly R147.0 million, a drop of about R9,644,447, more than twelve times the rate at which revenue fell. The one year this desk can check in currency, the improvement in the ratio was not an accounting trick of a shrinking denominator; absolute cost came down.

Where the revenue that funds SAMRO’s cost base actually comes from is lopsided. In FY2025, 55% of licence revenue came from broadcasting (radio and television), 26% from general licensing of physical venues such as clubs, malls and live venues, 15% from digital and streaming platforms, and 4% from foreign royalty income collected by sister societies abroad on South African members’ behalf.

A digital share of 15%, against 55% from broadcasting, is the more useful caveat for anyone reading the cost-to-income improvement as a streaming-era efficiency story. Most of the revenue this ratio is measured against still comes from radio and television licensing, not from the platforms where South African listening has actually been moving. A collecting society can run leaner on its broadcasting book while the digital book, still less than a sixth of revenue, remains comparatively untested at scale.

Does one year drive the ten-year figure?#

Removing the single worst year, FY2018 at 40.0%, drops the ten-year mean from 29.58% to 28.42%, a change of 3.9%. Removing the three worst years drops the mean by 10.6%, and the five worst years by 15.8%. No single year carries more than 13.5% of the ten-year total. The finding survives this test: the FY2025 figure of 21.6% is a real improvement on the decade average even after the worst year is discarded, not an artefact of one bad or one good year skewing a short series.

The counter-reading that does hold up: a ten-year window that opens on a low year (FY2016, before the spike) and closes on the lowest year yet recorded (FY2025) will always describe a bigger improvement than the underlying trend by itself supports. The honest version of SAMRO’s own number is not “seven and a half points better in ten years” but “eighteen points better than the FY2018 peak, over seven years, with the first three of those seven spent merely recovering lost ground.”

For a South African songwriter or independent publisher whose royalties SAMRO collects, the practical read is narrower than the headline ratio suggests. A falling cost-to-income ratio since FY2022 is a real, measured gain in how much of collected revenue reaches rightsholders rather than the organisation itself, and it has moved in the right direction for four straight years. But it says nothing about the separate, larger issue this desk has already measured elsewhere: SAMRO’s distributions payable and in progress stood at 189.1% of a full year’s licence revenue at FY2025 year end, and the cost-to-income ratio does not touch that backlog at all. A rightsholder deciding whether SAMRO is getting more efficient should look at both numbers, not the one the annual report puts in a chart.