The Royalty Nobody in the Region Collects: Neighbouring Rights, Explained

The Third Pot of Money

Music income is usually explained as two pots: recording royalties from sales and streams, and composition royalties for the writers. There is a third, and outside the Anglosphere's quirks it is often the difference between a working musician and a broke one. Neighbouring rights are the payments owed to performers and recording owners, as distinct from songwriters, when their recordings are broadcast or played publicly: radio, television, cafés, gyms, hotel lobbies, shops. In much of Europe and Latin America, dedicated societies collect these fees from broadcasters and businesses and split them between the featured artists, session players and labels on each track.

The session violinist on a hit, who wrote nothing and owns nothing, is owed neighbouring-rights income every time that hit airs, for decades. It is the closest thing recorded music has to a pension.

The Regional Blank

Now the regional ledger. For most Arab markets, through the entire broadcast era and the whole streaming boom, there has been no functioning neighbouring-rights collection at any scale: no society invoicing the radio stations, the malls, the airlines, the cafés. The music played anyway, constantly. The value simply transferred, unbilled, from performers to broadcasters and businesses, year after year, in one of the largest quiet subsidies in regional media. For a sense of what is missing: neighbouring rights routinely amount to hundreds of millions of euros annually in single European markets.

The first structural change has come from the Gulf, of all places. ESMAA, operating from Abu Dhabi since 2021, began licensing public performance commercially, an approach MIDiA Research flagged as a template for emerging markets. In 2025 the UAE went further, licensing the Emirates Music Rights Association and approving Music Nation, explicitly mandated to collect public performance and neighbouring-rights royalties. On paper, the Gulf now has the machinery it never had. What it does not yet have is a track record: no distribution figures have been published by any of these bodies.

Why It Matters More Than It Sounds

Neighbouring rights are unglamorous, which is why their absence went unprotested for decades, but three features make them strategically vital for the region's musicians. They pay performers, not just stars: session players, backing vocalists and arrangers, the invisible workforce of Arabic music, are entitled participants. They pay for catalogue: golden-age recordings that still saturate Arab radio would, under a functioning system, generate continuous income for ageing performers and heirs. And they are recession-proof relative to touring: the lobby plays music whether or not anyone books a concert, as the region learned brutally in 2020.

There is also a sovereignty angle. Until regional bodies collect at home, foreign societies collect for their own members from international platforms and broadcasts, while Arab performers' equivalent income evaporates. Building collection is not just artist welfare; it is keeping regional value in the region, the same argument Ghurba's money-flow reporting makes about every layer of this market.

What to Watch

Three tests will show whether the new machinery is real. First distributions: until EMRA, Music Nation or ESMAA publish what they have paid to whom, licensing is just invoicing. Reciprocal agreements: real systems exchange royalties with foreign societies, so an Emirati radio spin pays a French drummer and vice versa. And coverage creep: whether Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the wider region follow with performer-side collection of their own. If those three arrive, the region's musicians gain their first pension. If not, the Gulf will have built the box and left it empty.

Key Facts

• Neighbouring rights compensate performers and recording owners, separately from songwriters, for broadcast and public playback.

• Most Arab markets have had no functioning neighbouring-rights collection through the broadcast and streaming eras.

• ESMAA has licensed public performance from Abu Dhabi since 2021; the UAE licensed EMRA and approved Music Nation in 2025.

• Session musicians and backing performers are entitled participants in neighbouring-rights income where systems exist.

• None of the new Gulf bodies has yet published distribution figures.