The Second Royalty: How Music Publishing Works, and Why Arab Songwriters Rarely See It

Two Copyrights, Not One

Every released song is two assets wearing one name. The recording, the actual audio file, is typically owned or controlled by whoever financed it: an artist, a label. The composition, the melody and lyric underneath, belongs to its writers, and earns separately, every time the song is streamed, broadcast, performed live, covered, or synced to a screen. Globally, this second economy is enormous: author societies collected €13.97 billion in 2024, according to CISAC's Global Collections Report. It is also the half of the business the Arab world mostly forgot to build.

Where the Second Royalty Comes From

Composition money arrives through a few named channels, and knowing the names is half the literacy. Performance royalties are owed whenever a song is performed publicly, on radio and television, in cafés and malls, at concerts, including your own concert: venues and broadcasters pay licence fees to a collecting society, which distributes them to writers. Mechanical royalties are owed when a composition is reproduced, historically on discs, today mainly as a share of each stream. Sync fees are negotiated directly when a song is licensed to film, advertising or games. A publisher, if a writer signs with one, administers all of this in exchange for a share, typically registering works, chasing collections and pitching syncs.

The critical word in every sentence above is society. Without a functioning collective management organisation, performance and mechanical money is not lost so much as never gathered: the café still plays the song; nobody invoices the café.

The Regional Gap, Concretely

Now place the region on that map. Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Lebanon have long-standing author societies or SACEM arrangements, but their combined collections are a rounding error: CISAC's whole Africa region, Egyptian and Maghrebi societies included, collected €90 million in 2024, roughly 0.6 per cent of the world total. The Gulf spent the entire streaming boom with no licensed authors' society at all; only in 2025 did the UAE license the Emirates Music Rights Association and approve Music Nation as collection bodies, a shift Ghurba's money-flow investigation covers in detail. Decades of Gulf radio play, hotel background music and stadium covers generated, for the writers of those songs, approximately nothing.

The practical consequences stack up fast. An Egyptian writer whose song is a wedding standard across the Gulf has had no one to collect those performance fees. A Levantine composer covered by a major star typically negotiated a one-time buyout, because ongoing royalties were unenforceable, the buyout culture itself a rational response to missing infrastructure, with an oral-tradition version of the same theft running back generations. And diaspora writers often fare best of all, because membership in SACEM, PRS, ASCAP or GEMA lets European and American machinery collect what home cannot.

What a Working Writer Can Actually Do

The actionable version, briefly. Register with a functioning society, which for many Arab writers currently means a European or North American one if eligibility through residence, citizenship or publisher allows. Document splits in writing the day a song is finished, since societies pay registered shares, not memories. Keep publishing separate from recording deals unless the money says otherwise: signing away the composition inside a "360" or distribution contract is the region's most common quiet loss. Watch the new Gulf societies: if EMRA and its peers begin publishing distribution data, joining early may matter. And price syncs knowingly, because for unpublished writers a sync is often the only composition money that arrives as a lump sum with a contract attached.

None of this fixes the structural absence; that requires states, statutes and years. But the second royalty is not a myth or a Western luxury. It is a functioning global machine with a regional hole in it, and the first defence against a hole is knowing exactly where its edges are.

Key Facts

• Songs carry two separate rights: the sound recording and the underlying composition, each earning distinct royalties.

• Author societies worldwide collected €13.97bn in 2024; CISAC's Africa region, including Egypt and the Maghreb, accounted for about €90m (~0.6%).

• Composition income flows via performance royalties, mechanical royalties and sync fees, gathered through collecting societies and publishers.

• No Gulf state had a licensed authors' collecting society until the UAE licensed EMRA and approved Music Nation in 2025.

• Many Arab diaspora writers collect through SACEM, PRS, ASCAP or GEMA membership where eligible.