Nothing was bought. No catalogue moved. When SoundExchange and SAMPRA announced a reciprocal representation agreement on 18 November 2024, what changed hands was a collection mandate: permission for each organisation to collect money in its own territory on behalf of the other’s rightholders, and to send it on. No master recording was assigned. No publishing right was touched. Neither body acquired any right to exploit, licence onward or distribute a single recording.
Three organisations are named, not two. Royalties SAMPRA collects in South Africa that are attributable to United States featured performers route to SoundExchange. Royalties attributable to non-featured performers, meaning session musicians and backing vocalists, route to a separate body, the AFM & SAG-AFTRA Intellectual Property Rights Distribution Fund. The announcing party describes the arrangement as retroactive to the 2022 distribution period.
And there is a second thing in the documents that nobody announced. Read across four of SAMPRA’s own annual reviews, a record company relationship with SoundExchange appears to have been running since at least the end of 2022, two years before the performer agreement was made public.
A mandate is not a transfer#
It is worth being exact about the verbs.
SAMPRA does not own the recordings it licenses. It does not administer them in the sense a publisher administers a song. It licenses: it issues a blanket licence to South African broadcasters and to commercial premises that play recorded music, collects a fee, and distributes that fee to the performers and record companies whose recordings were used. In South Africa this right is called needletime. It exists because South African law creates a performance right in the sound recording itself, separate from the right in the underlying song.
SoundExchange does the equivalent job in the United States, but under a statute rather than a negotiated blanket licence. It is the body designated to administer the section 114 statutory licence, which covers digital audio transmissions: satellite radio, internet radio, and similar non-interactive services. It does not own recordings either, and it does not distribute music. It distributes money.
A reciprocal representation agreement between two such organisations does one thing. It authorises each to collect at home on behalf of the other’s rightholders. The copyright stays exactly where it was. That is why this deal has no purchase price and no equity component, and why “not disclosed” is not evasion here: there is nothing to disclose, because nothing was sold.
The performer side is new. The record company side is not.#
SAMPRA publishes a table of its international representation agreements in each annual review, stated as at 31 December of the year covered. Four of those tables are relevant.
- As at 31 December 2020: SoundExchange does not appear.
- As at 31 December 2021: SoundExchange does not appear.
- As at 31 December 2022: entry 26 reads “SoundExchange, USA, Record Companies“.
- As at 31 December 2024 and again as at 31 December 2025: entry 29 reads “SoundExchange, USA, Performers & Record Companies“.
The member type column moves from absent, to record companies only, to performers and record companies. On SAMPRA’s own published record, then, the 18 November 2024 announcement marks the addition of the performer leg to a relationship whose record company leg was already listed two years earlier. Neither organisation announced that earlier leg, and neither mentions it in the 2024 release.
The AFM & SAG-AFTRA Fund appears at entry 4 on the tables for 2024 and 2025 and on none of the earlier ones. Its arrival is new and matches the announcement.
A caution. SAMPRA has not stated when the record company relationship commenced, and no commencement document is public. What can be said is what SAMPRA published in its own member type column, four years running. That is evidence of a sequence, not a dated contract.
Why the money will never flow evenly#
Reciprocal sounds symmetrical. Here it is not, and the reason is written into United States law.
Section 114(a) of the United States Copyright Act limits the exclusive rights in a sound recording to reproduction, adaptation, distribution, and public performance by means of a digital audio transmission. It then says in terms that those rights “do not include any right of performance under section 106(4)”. Section 106(4) is the general public performance right. In plain terms: United States terrestrial radio, the AM and FM stations, pays nothing at all for the use of a recording. It pays songwriters and publishers. It pays the performers and the labels nothing.
South African radio does pay. So a United States performer played on South African radio has a royalty to collect, and a South African performer played on United States AM or FM radio has no royalty to collect, because there is no right for one to attach to. No agreement between two collecting societies can manufacture a right that a statute declines to create. The South African side of this pipe is limited to the United States digital pool.
There is no treaty behind it#
It would be reasonable to assume an arrangement like this implements a treaty obligation. It does not. On the WIPO contracting party registers, neither South Africa nor the United States is a party to the Rome Convention, the older instrument covering performers and phonogram producers. The United States ratified the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty on 14 September 1999, in force from 20 May 2002. South Africa signed that treaty on 12 December 1997 and the register records no ratification and no entry into force.
So the obligation running between these two organisations is purely contractual. It exists because they agreed it, and its terms are not public.
The money, so far as anyone has disclosed it#
SAMPRA’s audited financial statements for the year ended 31 March 2025 disclose foreign income of R1,854,418, against R1,619,241 restated for the prior year. That is a rise of about 14.5 per cent, and it represents 0.85 per cent of total licence fees of R219,109,712.
It is one line, with no counterparty breakdown, so the SoundExchange share cannot be derived and is not asserted here. What the line establishes is scale. Foreign income is a rounding error against SAMPRA’s domestic collections, which in the same year were R139.3 million from communication to the public and R77.9 million from radio broadcast. Anyone expecting this agreement to reshape SAMPRA’s revenue should look at that 0.85 per cent first. The pressing question at SAMPRA remains the domestic one, the gap between what it holds and what it pays out.
No African society is on the list#
One finding sits outside the agreement but belongs next to it. SAMPRA’s international representation table as at 31 December 2025 contains no African collective management organisation at all. COSBOTS of Botswana and GHAMRO of Ghana appear on the tables for 2020 and 2021, and on none of the tables for 2022, 2024 or 2025. No published source explains why, and this desk could not establish it.
The practical effect is that South Africa’s needletime society now has a working pipe to Washington and none to Accra or Gaborone.
What this means for artists#
This is not your streaming money and not your publishing money. Neighbouring rights sit in a third bucket, separate from the royalties your distributor pays you and separate from anything your publisher or PRO collects for the song. Nothing on your distribution statement changes because of this agreement.
You are only paid if you are registered and your metadata resolves. A reciprocal agreement moves money to a society. The society then has to match it to a named performer on a named recording. Recordings without correct ISRCs and complete performer credits are the ones that sit unmatched. Registration and clean metadata are the binding constraint, not the agreement.
Session players claim somewhere different from the featured artist. If you sang backing vocals or played on someone else’s record, your United States claim runs through the AFM & SAG-AFTRA Fund, not through SoundExchange. Two different organisations, two different registrations. In SoundExchange’s own United States distributions, 45 per cent goes to featured artists, 5 per cent to non-featured artists through that Fund, and 50 per cent to rights owners. Being a featured artist and being a rights owner are separate positions, and one person can hold both or neither.
There may be back money. The arrangement is described as retroactive to the 2022 distribution period. Retroactive means there is a period already collected and not yet paid through. That is a reason to check a registration now rather than next year.
If you are not South African, this does nothing for you. An agreement between a South African society and a United States one pays performers registered with those societies. A Nigerian, Ghanaian or Kenyan performer whose record is played on South African radio is reached only through their own society’s agreement with SAMPRA, and as at the end of 2025 no such agreement is listed.
What could not be established#
The agreement itself has not been published by either party and was not obtained. Term length, notice and termination provisions, the administration fee each society retains, the currency basis and the distribution frequency are unstated everywhere.
SAMPRA’s own documents also do not reconcile with themselves. In the review published in August 2026, one page states 71 international agreements, another states 37 and lists 33, and a third states 34 and lists 32. The review covering 2022 states thirty-one in the narrative and lists thirty in the table. Every count used in this piece is taken from the tables as listed, never from the narrative figure. That same August 2026 document carries “ANNUAL REVIEW 2023” in its running header on every page while its audited statements and auditor’s report are for the year ended 31 March 2025.
The full source list, rights and territory analysis and complete caveat sit on the deal record.
Corrections to desk@afrobeatswire.com.
