mōris · rights
your music, your rights, your money.
every time your music is played, on radio, in a mall, a hotel, an event, someone pays to use it. that money should reach you. often it does not. this page explains why, with the public figures, and what can be done about it.
a living document
this page is a work in progress, and it is written with the community.
it is not finished and never quite will be · it is updated as documents surface, as artists tell us what they are living, and as mistakes are pointed out to us. several passages here exist because somebody wrote in to correct or add something. that is how we want it to grow.
have information, a statement, a contract, a figure that contradicts what is written here? send it. we correct visibly, and we say what changed. you can also simply tell us your own case · several sections of this page started that way.
the detailed record on MASA · figures, quotations, documents →
who is speaking
mōris. and we have a stake in this.
mōris is a mauritian community hüb, started in 2021 · live radio, shows, an indian ocean library, the storë at caudan, events, and the hüb itself, where people join, listen and find each other. the radio is the heartbeat, the community is the point.
it is run by a team of artists, musicians and producers. one house holds five labels and 70+ artists, and has been working for twenty years.
we are not outside observers, and there are two specific reasons. one · our own artists are among those not being paid · this is not an abstract cause for us, it arrives in our post. two · we are proposing to build the alternative, and if it happens we would be involved in it.
we are saying it ourselves, up front rather than in a footnote, because somebody would eventually say it for us. and because it changes nothing about what follows: every figure on this page points to a published document you can open yourself. you are not asked to trust us · you are asked to check. if one figure is wrong, tell us and it gets corrected.
our standard, so you can check
- nothing here is invented. every figure comes from MASA’s published accounts, the national audit office reports, the parliamentary record, the fees regulations, or mauritius’s own reporting to UNESCO.
- when we quote, it is word for word, with the source named.
- when a calculation is ours, we say so · "our calculation".
- when something is unverified, we write that rather than let it pass as fact.
- the original documents are linked below. read them yourself.
- found a mistake? tell us and we correct it · that serves us as much as you.
the short version · 5 minutes
what you need to know, in fourteen points.
each point opens the full dossier at the exact place. everything is sourced further down.
nineteen sections, about thirty minutes.
how it works
the system as it is meant to work. no argument yet, just the mechanics.
when you make a track, you create three different things. most artists only know about one.
the composition
the song itself · the melody, the chords, the words
created by the author and the composer. it exists before any recording, and it survives every recording. if someone covers your song in a club twenty years from now, this is the right that still pays you.
author · composer
the publishing
the administration of that composition
the publisher registers the work, declares the splits, chases the money and pays the author. this is a share of the composition, not a separate work. in mauritius, publishing is where most of the money quietly goes missing, because a work that is never properly registered can never be properly paid.
publisher
the recording
the master · this specific recorded version
made by the performer and paid for by the producer or label. these are the neighbouring rights. a different version of the same song is a different master, owned by whoever made it. this is the level most disputes are fought over.
performer · producer · label
one track can therefore pay three different people, for three different reasons. if you wrote, performed and produced your own track, all three are yours · provided it is registered that way.
this is the most expensive confusion in the business. DistroKid is not a collecting society, and a collecting society does not put you on spotify. both pay you, for different things.
the collecting society · MASA, SACEM, PRS
it owns nothing and distributes nothing. it collects money for the composition when it is played in public · on radio, on TV, in a hotel, a mall, a concert. it bills the user, takes its commission, and pays the author, composer and publisher. that is all it does. it will never put you on a platform.
the label
it funds and usually owns the recording, the master. it puts money into studio, production, promotion, sometimes vinyl · and recoups that from revenue before splitting. a label replaces neither the society nor the distributor. it employs both.
the distributor · TuneCore, DistroKid, CD Baby, Believe
and here is the trap.
a distributor delivers your recording to the platforms and pays you the recording share of streaming. it does that job very well, for a few dollars a year. but it does not collect public performance royalties on your composition · that is not its job, and it does not claim to be.
★ the direct consequence, and this is where the money vanishes. a streamed track generates two separate flows: the recording side, which your distributor pays you · and the composition side, which travels through societies and publishers. if you are registered nowhere on the composition side, that second flow exists and never reaches you. you look at your DistroKid dashboard and believe you were paid everything. you were paid one half.
some distributors sell a "publishing administration" add-on that goes and claims that share for you, for a percentage. it is not a scam · it is simply a service most artists do not know they need to buy, or to get some other way.
and the codes · ISRC versus ISWC
ISRC · International Standard Recording Code. it identifies the recording. your distributor or label assigns one automatically on every release. you already have them, even if you have never looked.
ISWC · International Standard Musical Work Code, ISO 15707. it identifies the composition, the song itself, independent of any version. it is assigned through the society chain, via CISAC.
IPI · the number identifying the person, writer, composer or publisher. without it, no society anywhere knows where to send the money.
★ and this is where it all meets. somebody hands you an ISRC on your first release. nobody in mauritius hands you an ISWC. so your recording is identifiable anywhere in the world and your composition is identifiable nowhere. that is the mechanical reason the recording money arrives and the composition money does not · the two halves of your track do not carry the same passport.
and if my track plays on radio overseas?
in theory you get paid. in practice it hangs on a code you do not have.
the mechanism exists and it is solid. if your track plays on french radio, SACEM collects in france · it does not know you, but it knows MASA. the two societies hold a reciprocal agreement, and MASA states it has 43 of them. SACEM identifies the work, sees it belongs to mauritian repertoire, and remits the money to MASA, which must then pay you. that is how music travels and money comes back · everywhere in the world.
but there are three conditions, and they stack. one · you must be a member and the work must be on deposit · otherwise there is nothing to match to. two · the foreign society must be able to identify the work, which is done by ISWC and IPI in the international databases. a work it cannot match does not get paid · it goes into suspense, sometimes for years, sometimes for good. three · the money must then travel through MASA and reach you.
★ this is exactly why the register question further down is not a technical question. without an ISWC, your track is invisible to the 227 societies in the international network. it can play every day in paris, london or johannesburg · if it cannot be matched to an identified rightsholder, the money exists and sits abroad.
and there is something to know about what comes in. MASA’s rules provide, word for word, that "the percentage deducted shall be the same for authors and publishers of MASA as for the Sister Society". put plainly, the 30% deduction applies by default to money collected for you abroad as well · money MASA did not have to go and collect. for comparison, switzerland’s SUISA takes only 4% on sums collected on behalf of other societies.
how much actually came in from abroad, and for whom? we do not know. the july 2026 document shows money going out to foreign societies, rs 481,401. it shows nothing coming in. that is one of the questions we have asked, and it has not been answered.
these tariffs are written in the law. few artists have ever seen them.
copyright (fees) regulations 2020, amended 2021. this is money collected in your name. note: the 2021 amendment removed the whole small-shop schedule, and there is no entry at all for shopping malls.
"but i already pay for spotify"
the subscription covers your living room, not your room.
this is the objection venues raise most often, and the law answers it in one definition. the Copyright Act 2014 defines "public performance" as, for a work, "the recitation, playing, dancing, acting or otherwise performing the work, either directly or by means of any device or process" · and for a phonogram, "making the recorded sounds audible", wherever that happens "at a place or places where persons outside the normal circle of the family and its closest acquaintances can be present".
read it word by word. "by any device or process" · a phone, a speaker, a tablet, a laptop, it makes no difference. "making the recorded sounds audible" · pressing play is enough. "outside the normal circle of the family" · a café, a shop, a hotel lobby. the source is not in the definition at all · nothing in it distinguishes spotify from a CD, a USB stick or the radio.
and there is a second reason, this one contractual. a consumer subscription licenses personal listening. you are paying for access to the recording, for yourself. you are not buying the public performance right in the composition, which belongs to the writer and composer and can only be granted by the rightsholder or the society acting for them. that is exactly why these platforms sell separate business products · if the consumer subscription covered it, those products would not exist.
★ and notice what that implies for the rest of this page. a venue running a curated spotify playlist does need the licence · but the platform knows exactly what was played, track by track, second by second. the data already exists. it is simply not asked of anyone. that is the strongest possible argument against the idea that measuring would be hard or expensive: in most venues it is already measured, elsewhere, by somebody else.
who decided these amounts?
a minister, by regulation.
these are not tariffs negotiated with artists, nor voted by MASA’s members, nor debated line by line in parliament. they are regulations · subsidiary legislation. the Copyright Act 2014, section 57, puts it in two sentences: "The Minister may make such regulations as he thinks fit for the purposes of this Act" and "Regulations made under subsection (1) may provide for the levying of fees and charges".
so the answer is: the responsible minister, through the Copyright (Fees) Regulations 2020, in force from 1 july 2020. and by the same kind of instrument, in 2021, an amendment removed the entire small-shop schedule and granted the tourism sector a fee holiday · a sector which, per the Director of Audit, accounted for "more than 70 per cent of the revenue of the Society".
this is not illegitimate · it is how subsidiary legislation works, and it lets schedules be adjusted without a new act each time. but it answers the question artists keep asking, "why these figures?" · they were not set by the people whose money is at stake, and they can be changed the same way, with no new vote in parliament.
so what is that per track?
nobody sets that price. it falls out of a division.
this is the point almost everyone misses. these tariffs are not per-track prices. they are flat annual licences. so the value of one play is not decided by anyone · it is the result of a division: the licence, divided by however many tracks actually played. let us do it.
12 hours of music a day · 720 minutes. an average track of 4 minutes · 180 plays a day. × 365 days · 65,700 plays a year. (our calculation, and you can change the assumptions.)
so depending on the venue, one play is worth between 3 cents and rs 1.52 before deductions. and notice what that implies: the licence is fixed, the divisor is not. the more music a venue plays, the less each play is worth. a bar running 16 hours a day pays exactly what a bar running 4 hours pays.
★ and this is why "rs 1 per track", or "0.6 cents", circulate without anyone being able to confirm them. you cannot compute a per-play value without counting the plays, and nobody counts them. the divisor is unknown. every per-track figure quoted in mauritius today, including ours above, rests on an assumption rather than a measurement.
one last useful marker. if you genuinely wanted rs 1 per play in a restaurant above 40 covers, the licence would have to be rs 65,700 a year. it is rs 5,000. that is thirteen times less. this is not an argument for multiplying tariffs by thirteen · it is the measure of the gap between what people imagine and what the schedule actually provides.
our own experience · take it for what it is
one user files a real log.
this is not a document, it is our own account, and we flag it as such. asking MASA for the detail behind a distribution, it took a great deal of pushing to obtain an excel file · and the answer we were given was that only the MBC files excel sheets. other users do not provide a usable log.
★ if that is right, it closes the argument in this section. the divisor is not merely unknown in theory · it is unknown in practice, because one user in the country produces workable data and it is the public broadcaster. everything else · hotels, malls, nightclubs, supermarkets · pays a licence with nothing coming back. which is precisely what the log sheet form predicted: fifteen rows, no column for the number of plays.
we are not asking anyone to take our word for it. it is checkable with one question, and any member can ask it: which users filed a log for the last distribution? if the answer is "the MBC", it is in this paragraph. if it is anything else, tell us and we correct it.
three separate permissions, often confused with each other.
worth knowing, and it matters here: a terrestrial broadcast licence is reserved for citizens and residents, barred to political parties and religious organisations, and capped at 20% foreign shareholding. terrestrial transmission must pass through a single carrier. an online radio does not face the same frequency constraints, but the music-rights layer stays exactly the same.
and a community web radio, with no advertising?
the schedule has no answer for this.
for radio, the tariff is expressed as a percentage of income. a community station carrying no advertising has no such income · the formula then yields almost nothing, and a figure has to be arrived at some other way. that is how you end up with a flat amount agreed case by case, outside the regulations.
on the broadcasting side, the IBA regime is built around frequencies, which an online-only station does not use. on the rights side nothing changes: communicating music to the public requires authorisation, advertising or no advertising. so a community radio can be entirely compliant · but the law offers it no clear category, and that should be fixed.
the grey area
and music delivered into a venue by an outside service?
a hotel, a shop or a restaurant does not always choose its own music: it uses a service that selects it and sends it in, often as a stream. the tariff schedule only recognises the venue · so much per room, so much per establishment. it says nothing about who supplies the music, or how it arrives. the question is not the amount, it is the legal basis and the category · and it is exactly the kind of gap a reform should close.
where it breaks
now the figures. all of them from published documents, quoted word for word.
on rs 100 collected for your song.
you see about 63 rupees in every 100 · before anyone even asks whether the play was counted.
source · written answer by the minister of arts and cultural heritage, PQ B/1095, national assembly, 18 july 2023: hansard → “MASA … retains 30% of the royalties to meet its administrative costs and 7% is transferred to the MASA Provident and Benevolent Fund”. the mechanism is also set out in MASA’s own rules (§2.3): MRA tax first, then the board-set administrative deduction, then 10% of the remainder to the social welfare fund · MASA rules →
and elsewhere?
three of the largest societies in the world, handling worldwide repertoires and millions of works, all sit around 10%. MASA deducts 30, plus 7. the mauritian deduction is roughly three times that of far bigger societies · for a service that does not measure what plays.
sources · PRS annual report 2024 → · ASCAP 2024 revenue and distributions · SACEM 2025 deduction rate. worth noting: these societies publish this figure every year. in mauritius it took a parliamentary question to obtain it.
is MASA connected to the rest of the world?
yes. MASA has been a member of CISAC, the international confederation of authors’ societies, since 1991, for the musical repertoire · and a full member of IFRRO for reproduction rights. it states 43 reciprocal agreements, with SACEM, PRS, BMI, ASCAP, GEMA, SUISA, SAMRO, UBC, IPRS and APRA-AMCOS among others.
this matters in both directions. those agreements are meant to bring in money earned by mauritian artists abroad, and to send out what is owed to foreign artists played here. two things are worth noting, plainly: CISAC’s directory records MASA’s membership as provisional rather than full · and foreign rightsholders were excluded from the 2025 distribution. the full list of the 43 partner societies is published nowhere.
what a working society looks like
SUISA, the swiss society, is worth looking at closely · because it already does, and has done for years, what many mauritian artists are asking for.
★ two things to take from this. first, that model is precisely the "20 to run the house, 10 back to the artists" idea · except SUISA does it at 12.9 + 7.5 + 2.5, and the share set aside for creators goes to a pension and a creation fund, not into an undifferentiated account. so it is not a fantasy: it is a working society that publishes its rules and has done this for years.
★ second, and this is the decisive point for any mauritian artist registered abroad: SUISA deducts just 4% on revenue it collects for others · the work there is administrative, not editorial. MASA’s rules provide the opposite: "the percentage deducted shall be the same for authors and publishers of MASA as for the Sister Society", meaning 30% by default on what it sends back to SACEM or PRS. four percent on one side, thirty on the other, for the same service.
but who set the 30%?
nobody imposed it. the board decides it itself.
the rate appears neither in the copyright act nor in the fees regulations. no minister set it, and the members do not vote on it. MASA’s own rules say it word for word: “All percentage for deduction shall be decided by the Board in line with the international practice.”
★ and the rule itself sets the test: “in line with the international practice”. international practice is SACEM at 9.8%, PRS under 10%, ASCAP around 10%. the mauritian deduction is therefore roughly three times the standard its own rule sets for it. the question is not whether a society may deduct · it is how 30% is justified against the text MASA wrote for itself.
and the rules provide further layers, also set by the board: 10% of the remainder to the social welfare fund, then a reserve “for any future claim” whose “percentage… shall be determined by the Board”. at every level, the same body decides what it keeps.
MASA rules 2018, §2.3
an example, not a demand
20% to run the house. 10% that goes back into the artists themselves.
most artists do not object to a society taking its share. what troubles them is what that share produces. a lower administrative deduction, with a clearly ring-fenced share going back to artists · training, equipment, advances, studio time, legal support · changes what the deduction is: it stops being a cost and becomes an investment in the people who make the music. the exact number is open to discussion. the principle is simple: every rupee held back should come back to the music.
the published totals, divided by the number of beneficiaries.
read this correctly
this is not an equal split, and nobody received that amount.
the average above is our own division · the published total divided by the number of beneficiaries. it is there only to give the order of magnitude. MASA does not split the sum equally: its rules provide for distribution according to usage, from the log sheets users return, with sampling where those are missing. in reality some receive far more, most receive far less.
and that is exactly how it should work. if your music was not played, you have no claim on that money · the money should follow the plays. so the problem is not the principle, it is the measurement: when the log sheets are filled in by the users themselves, when sampling fills the gaps, and when an entire hotel sector was paid for a decade on radio data, distribution "according to usage" is no longer based on actual usage.
in 2025 the distribution was suspended.
source · figures reported by mauritius to UNESCO’s policy monitoring platform, exact to the cent: unesco.org → “2020/2021 Rs 14,557,486.61 – 2653 beneficiaries … 2023/2024 Rs 16,925,488.33 – 4473 beneficiaries”.
so who actually receives this money?
three conditions, and almost nobody meets all three.
1 · be registered. the law is explicit: the society manages the rights of its members where those members have deposited their works with it. if you are not registered, your play does not pay you · it joins the pile.
2 · have been played. fair enough, and that is how it should work.
3 · have been played on the right station. the local split rests on a sample of the 200 most-played titles on MBC radio. outside those 200 you receive nothing · however much your track ran all year in clubs, hotels or on another station.
and "beneficiary" does not mean "musician". MASA’s membership spans authors, composers and publishers, as well as audiovisual, theatrical and literary work. a publisher can therefore be one of the 2,160.
of every rs 100 distributed in july 2026:
and within the local share, the concentration is steep. taking the midpoint of each published band, the 35 people in the top band account on their own for roughly a third of everything paid locally · for 1.6% of the beneficiaries. the 907 people paid between zero and one hundred rupees share under 1% of the total. (our calculation, from the published bands.)
MASA states over 5,000 members and associate members · only 2,160 were paid in july 2026
it is not one year. and the real figure is larger · it sits in their audited accounts.
on the balance sheet, 30 june 2020
undistributed copyright rights: rs 121,759,081.
this is not an estimate, nor a press rumour. it is a line in MASA’s audited balance sheet, note 8 · money the society acknowledges it owes to rightsholders. the year before: rs 120,813,460. so the pile does not date from 2025, and it is not 95 million · it was already past 121 million in 2020.
★ and MASA’s cash at the same date stood at rs 109,549,995. in other words, it owed artists rs 12.2 million more than it held in the bank. the whole of that debt is nonetheless classified as a CURRENT liability, meaning due within twelve months.
annual report 2019-2020, note 8 and note 6
and it climbs, year after year
owed to rightsholders cash held
across eight years the debt to artists goes from rs 39.1 million to a peak of rs 121.8 million · it tripled. it has been falling since 2020, to rs 102.3 million in 2022, which should be said too. and across the whole period cash never once covered the sum owed · in 2018 it covered only 78.8% of it.
every figure above is the "undistributed copyright rights" line from the audited accounts of that year · like for like across the whole series, from 2012 to 2022.
an honest qualification: part of that sum is legitimately awaiting the next distribution round. the question is what part, and for how long. that is exactly what an ageing analysis would show · and there is none. the accounts contain no ageing breakdown, no split by year of collection, and no written policy on what becomes of sums never claimed.
step one · what had to be collected
if the artist receives about 63 rupees in every 100, then any sum distributed implies a collection of at least that sum divided by 0.63.
that is a floor, not a total. anything collected beyond that minimum does not go out in the distribution · it joins the pile.
step two · the annual residue
about rs 8 million that does not find its owner in a single year. over eleven years that is roughly rs 91 million. that is how you reach 95.
and the proof was already in the accounts
MASA’s own annual report for 2017-2018 records payables of rs 107,298,036 against cash of rs 84,284,582, and negative equity. in a collecting society those payables are largely money owed to rightsholders. so a nine-figure pile was already sitting there in 2018 · and the cash on hand did not even cover it.
the conclusion: rs 95 million is not a sudden accident, it is a slow leak. every year a share of the money collected finds no name attached to it, because nobody measures what actually plays. the sum does not correct itself · it accumulates until somebody notices.
what we found reading the reports themselves
three annual reports published with no audit report at all.
we read the 2017-2018, 2018-2019 and 2019-2020 reports MASA publishes, in full. none of the three contains a report from the Director of Audit · no opinion, no qualification, nothing. the table of contents lists none. the financial statements carry only board signatures. yet external audit is stated in the text: "The Society’s Financial Statements are audited by the National Audit Office against a fee".
the three sets of financial statements were also approved by the board on the same day, 5 july 2022 · up to four years after the year they cover. and on internal audit the 2019-2020 report is explicit: "For the period under review, no audit review has yet been conducted", with a board charter and code of ethics "yet to be drafted".
★ one detail explains a great deal: the 2017-2018 report records, on its staffing page, "Director: Under Interdiction since June 2011" and "Accountant: Vacant", with the board listing "Three Members of the Society (Elections not held)". an institution without its director since 2011 and without an accountant cannot keep track-by-track records.
the distributed figures and the balance sheet are published. the rs 40 million collection is a stated working assumption, not an official figure · only MASA can publish the real one. that is precisely what this page is asking for.
on 31 july 2026 MASA published the breakdown of its distribution. it confirms everything above · in its own figures.
the administrative deduction works out at 29.95% · the 30% is no longer a statement made to parliament, it is in their own arithmetic. 64.8% is left for rightsholders.
and where that money came from
★ 80.5% of this exercise came from TWO state-owned entities · the MBC, the state broadcaster, and Air Mauritius. and nothing at all came from hotels, nightclubs, restaurants or shops · the very users carrying the highest tariffs in the regulations. the money is not, in the main, coming from the private sector that plays music every day.
before the pandemic the picture was the reverse: the national audit office records that tourism operators accounted for "more than 70 per cent of the revenue of the Society". the 2021 regulations granted them a fee holiday for 2020-21 and 2021-22, and those fees were not collected. the open question, and it is a serious one: did that sector ever come back?
why so little is collected
the 2020 tariff schedule still had not been implemented in september 2025.
this is not conjecture. it is a qualification by the Director of Audit, signed 10 september 2025, word for word: "The implementation of the regulations was not finalised as of September 2025. Significant revenue that was likely to improve the turnaround of the Society was not being collected." the regulations in question, in force since 1 july 2020, set out exactly what the public broadcaster, private radios, subscription television and mobile operators must pay.
five years after coming into force, the schedule was not being applied. that is why the money comes mainly from the MBC and air mauritius, and why a hotel can say it plays no music with nobody coming to check. the problem is not only that distribution is blind · it is that collection itself was never put in place.
and to be paid, you must first declare
declaration is done on paper.
the forms do exist · a "Musical Declaration Form", a "Log Sheet", an "Application for Membership" and five others. they are PDFs to download, fill in on paper and deliver. there is no online registration system. we checked this ourselves on MASA’s site · the documents are there, and that should be said plainly rather than letting anyone believe otherwise.
but where are they? under "Resources · Downloads", an administrative section. the one page on the site addressed to creators, "Artists Corner", holds nothing. so the single thing every artist must do is filed under admin, and the space meant for them is empty.
★ and here is the point that matters. the burden sits entirely with the artist, offline, with no reminder and no support · and MASA then books the resulting gaps in its own accounts as "Undocumented Works (wrong work entry/not declared)", rs 1,037,892 in the july 2026 exercise alone. the same institution that makes declaration a paper errand records the consequence as the artist’s failure. that is a process design failure, not a failure of the people who make the music.
the same mechanism produces the rs 4,375,563 "brought forward… because of Incomplete Cue Sheets and Log Sheets": the paperwork is left to users and creators, nobody chases it, and the money stops moving.
and how they choose who to pay
the best two hundred songs.
MASA describes its own method, in its 2021-2022 report: "Sampling method of best 200 songs for local repertoire and 1/51 for foreign repertoire based on log sheets provided by MBC Radio." in other words, distribution of the local repertoire rests on a sample of the two hundred most-played titles, drawn from the log sheets of a single source: MBC radio.
if your track is not in the two hundred, you receive nothing · however many times it played in a club, a hotel, an event or on another station. that is the mechanical explanation for the 907 people paid between zero and one hundred rupees. and it is also why money collected from air mauritius, for music played in the air, is shared out according to what was played on MBC radio.
★ and the sentence is never explained. "best 200" by what measure? over what period? one station, or all MBC channels? is the local repertoire separated out before the ranking, or are the 200 drawn from a log where international programming dominates? the wording says "for local repertoire", which suggests local works are ranked among themselves · but no published document confirms it, and nobody outside has ever seen the list. that is the whole problem: a rule that decides who gets paid and who does not should be checkable by any member. this one is not.
and even on the most generous reading, the one where all two hundred places are reserved for local repertoire, the arithmetic does not work · MASA reports 4,019 associate members in the musical category alone. two hundred places, one source of logs, and everyone else rounded to nothing.
the simplest request of all
publish the playlogs.
the MBC settled roughly rs 8 million in arrears, and that money funded most of the july 2026 distribution. the obvious question: what music was played to earn it? the logs exist · MASA states plainly that its distribution rests on "log sheets provided by MBC Radio".
and none of it is confidential. this is a public broadcaster, funded by a licence fee on the whole country’s electricity bills, playing music in the open. whatever went out on air has already been heard by everyone. it is not a trade secret · it is a record of what was broadcast in public, with public money.
yet mauritius still has no access-to-information law · promised since 1995, never passed. so there is no way to compel this. it can only be voluntary · which is exactly why it is worth asking for. an artist should be able to check the evidence on which their payment was calculated. this is the cheapest reform on this entire page: the file already exists, it only has to be published.
and where that net goes
★ rs 1,037,892 · 16% of everything distributable · is booked as "undocumented works, wrong work entry or not declared". money that could not be attached to any person. the pile is not a thing of the past, it forms now, in every exercise.
written in red on their document
rs 4,375,563 could not be processed at all.
carried forward to the december 2026 distribution, and MASA gives the reason itself, word for word: "because of Incomplete Cue Sheets and Log Sheets". the detail: MBC television 2023, rs 1,624,625, for "insufficient data from MBC", and small users 2024, rs 2,750,938, for "late submission of data".
this is precisely what this page has been saying, except it is no longer us saying it. when the measurement is missing, the money does not move · and it cannot reach the person who earned it.
who got paid, and how much
2,160 local rightsholders were paid. of them, 907 received between zero and one hundred rupees, and 1,422 · two in three · received under five hundred. thirty-five people reached the rs 25,000 to 75,000 band. the average, rs 2,184, therefore describes almost nobody. and there were 4,473 beneficiaries in 2023-24: the number of people paid has more than halved.
our check, which you can repeat
one line of this document does not add up.
9,904,500.20 minus 2,966,627.87 minus 516,020.93 comes to 6,421,851.40. the stated net is 6,420,836.87. rs 1,014.53 is missing. every other total in the document reconciles exactly · the collection categories, the breakdown, the beneficiary bands. only that line resists. yet the document states it was "audited by the Distribution Audit Committee on 28 July 2026" and approved by the board on the 29th.
and a second question, without reproach: the social deduction comes to 7.44% of the balance after administration, where MASA’s own rules (§2.3.3) provide for 10%. one of the two needs explaining. these are small sums · but a statement artists are meant to rely on should add up, and a published rule should match a published figure.
source · MASA, "Distribution Exercise July 2026", ref DE/002/JUL/2026, 31 july 2026. copy hosted here: the document →
this is the most important thing on this page. the failures are not data-entry errors · they are built into the forms. and you can check it yourself in ten minutes, in a browser.
the musical works declaration form
no field for splits.
we downloaded the form and extracted it ourselves. ten rows, five columns: TITLE OF WORK · AUTHOR · COMPOSER · ARRANGER · PUBLISHER. that is the whole thing. no percentages anywhere. two composers at 50/50 cannot be expressed on this document. there is no ISWC, no IPI, no ISRC, no duration, no date of creation, no alternative titles.
a society that never records shares cannot distribute correctly. it can only guess, or apply a default. so the rs 1,037,892 of "wrong work entry / not declared" follows from the form, not from artists being careless.
and it contradicts itself twice
the form asks for your PUBLISHER · then, further down, makes you certify, word for word: "no exploitation rights in and to my works have been granted to third parties". anyone with a publishing deal cannot sign this document without contradicting themselves.
it asks for your ARRANGER · then makes you certify: "no part of the work has been adapted from another source and that it is an original work". anyone arranging traditional séga or seggae cannot sign it either.
and clause VI adds: "The MASA shall not be held liable for any claims of any kind arising from disputes and actions relating to my involvement in the works deposited." the form cannot record shares, and then disclaims all liability for the disputes that absence produces.
the log sheet, and this is the decisive one
no field for the number of plays.
"LISTE DU RÉPERTOIRE UTILISÉ". this is the document an establishment fills in · a bar, a hotel, a mall. in french only. fifteen rows, four columns: TITRE · ARTISTE · AUT/COMP. · EDITEUR. we searched the file: zero occurrences of play count, number of broadcasts, duration, time, ISRC or ISWC.
without a play count, proportional distribution is arithmetically impossible. a track played two hundred times and a track played once are identical on this form. and fifteen rows, for a venue playing music all day.
this is the answer to the question everyone asks · what is actually played in the venues that pay? nobody knows, because the only instrument designed to find out does not ask. the rs 4,375,563 carried forward "Because of Incomplete Cue Sheets and Log Sheets" was guaranteed by the form. even perfectly completed, it cannot produce a fair distribution.
the chain, entirely from their own documents
intake cannot capture splits or identifiers → usage cannot be measured → rs 1,037,892 undocumented and rs 4,375,563 unprocessable → 66% of recipients under rs 500, and lags of several years → and five years without payment makes you a Dormant Member, which removes your vote.
no names, no salaries, no adjectives. every link is a quotation from their own documents.
the dates, and what they tell you
every PDF carries its creation date in its properties, and the server records when the file was placed online and last changed. here are all eight forms.
the four core forms were made in one sitting. membership at 09:23, musical at 09:24, other works at 09:27, literary at 11:14 · all on 1 june 2022, all from Word 2013, the musical one from a template named "Dec Music.dot". a morning’s work, not a designed system. then nothing: uploaded july 2022, last modified 28 september 2022, unchanged for four years. and the log sheet is older still · 15 july 2020, six years old, still the live template, still with no play-count column.
★ and here is the contrast, which needs no adjective at all. the only documents renewed recently are the licence application forms, rebuilt in february 2025 · the ones that bring money in from venues. the declaration forms and the log sheet, which is to say precisely the ones by which money is attributed to artists, have not been touched since 2022. the distribution failures recorded in 2026 are being produced by forms nobody has revised in four years.
one caveat, to keep this honest: the uploads folder shows when a file was placed on this site. if MASA migrated from an earlier site, versions could have existed elsewhere before. the PDF creation dates are the stronger evidence, and the Wayback archive cannot help here · it holds only four snapshots, the earliest from august 2024.
what we can prove, and what we cannot
the files’ internal properties give their generation dates · the declaration form was produced on 1 june 2022 from a Word template called "Dec Music.dot", the log sheet on 15 july 2020. so we can establish when these versions appeared. we cannot establish that nothing preceded them, and we do not claim it.
one last detail, small but telling: the log sheet gives one contact address, copyrightsoc@intnet.mu, and the declaration form gives another, masa.admin@myt.mu. two forms live at the same time, two different addresses.
we have archived these documents with their SHA-256 hashes and the date of retrieval. if they change or disappear, there will be a record of what they said on 4 august 2026.
in most countries you can search a work online and see who owns it. in mauritius there is no public list of the works on deposit.
what everyone else does
in the united states, ASCAP and BMI jointly publish Songview · over 38 million works, searchable at no charge, no account needed. the UK’s PRS runs a public works search. SACEM publishes its repertoire at repertoire.sacem.fr. and above all of them, CISAC operates the ISWC portal and the CIS-Net network: 94.4 million works and more than 52 million ISWC codes, fed by 112 societies for their domestic repertoire and 62 for international, searched daily by 126 societies.
in mauritius
nothing.
we went through the whole of MASA’s website. the menu runs to: About, Members, Artists, Contact, Resources, FAQs. the one data section, "Publication of Accounts", holds nothing but PDFs of annual reports. there is no search, no repertoire, no catalogue, no browsable member list, not one work named anywhere. check it yourself, it takes two minutes.
and here is the surprising part
the law never required one.
we read the law as it currently stands · section 45 was repealed and replaced entirely by the 2017 amendment and is now titled "Functions of Society". it lists fourteen functions, (a) to (n): collect and distribute, set membership classes, defend its members, promote national creativity, administer rights, negotiate with users, grant authorisations, sign reciprocal agreements, bring memberships home, enter contracts, foster understanding, inform its members, run a provident and benevolent fund, and any other prescribed function. not one of those fourteen is to keep or publish a register of works. and section 48, also replaced in 2017, is now titled "Annual report": it requires the Director to prepare and submit a report to the Board and the Director of Audit. it is not even a duty to publish.
so this is not only an administrative failure. it is a gap in the law. and it is fixable: one line added to section 45 requiring the Society to keep a register of works and to make it public.
CISAC, however, does require it
MASA is a CISAC member. and CISAC states it plainly: "a commitment to participate in CIS is a condition of CISAC membership". CIS-Net is precisely the network through which societies contribute their domestic repertoire into a shared database, with ISWC codes, so that works can be identified and paid anywhere in the world.
we do not know whether mauritian repertoire is in there, or whether mauritian works are assigned ISWCs. we do not claim otherwise. it is a question, and it has a simple answer that only MASA can give.
why this matters, concretely
you cannot check yourself. there is no way to confirm your work is on deposit, that the splits between writer, composer and publisher are right, or that nobody else has claimed it.
the user does not know what they are paying for. a radio, a hotel, a mall pays a licence with no way to see the list of what it covers.
money earned abroad does not come home. a foreign society that cannot match a mauritian work to an identified rightsholder does not pay it · it holds it in suspense.
and it makes everything else uncheckable. with no register, nobody can verify the "best 200", and nobody can audit "Undocumented Works". both problems on this page come from the same hole.
we asked
we put the question to MASA, more than once, and had no reply. this is not an accusation, it is a fact we are reporting · and mauritius still has no Freedom of Information Act, promised since 1995, so there is no procedure to compel an answer. if you asked and were answered, send it to us · we will publish it here as it stands.
none of this is rumour. all of it is published.
you cannot pay fairly what you do not measure.
distribution rests on log sheets that the users themselves are meant to fill in and return, or, failing that, on sampling. it is written plainly in the statutes. there is no independent measurement of what actually plays in this country.
without measurement a tariff is just a number on paper: it tells nobody whose money it is. that is why the argument about percentages misses the point · a perfect split of a wrongly attributed sum is still wrongly attributed.
the circuit, in four steps
and the other half of the problem
nobody verifies who uses music either.
the same blindness works at the collection end. an establishment can simply state that it does not play music, and nothing exists to test that · no log, no check, no evidence. the tariff assumes you can tell who uses music, when nothing establishes it.
which is why a measurement layer does not cost a collecting society money · it earns it. the same technology that identifies what plays inside a hotel also establishes that music is playing there at all. collecting properly and distributing properly are the same problem, with the same solution.
and this is not hypothetical. for a decade the entire hotel sector was distributed on radio airplay data · meaning the money a hotel paid went to whoever was played on the radio, not to whoever was played in the hotel. the venue paid for one set of music, and a different set got paid.
what can be done
the part that matters. what is possible, what it costs, and what has to change.
the short answer: the only real obstacle is a mauritian one.
can we close MASA?
only parliament could: MASA is created by the law itself (section 43), so repealing it would take an act. but this is probably the wrong question. closing it with nothing in its place would remove the collection mechanism and the 43 reciprocal agreements that bring in money earned abroad · artists would lose first. and more to the point, it is not necessary: in most countries several bodies coexist.
can we open a new entity?
not under mauritian law as it stands. since 2017 the law names only "the Society", and provides no procedure for recognising another one. it would take an amendment to the 2014 act · principally section 42, with the sections tied to it, plus a licensing regime for any management organisation. that is a bill, not a form to fill in. nothing else stands in the way.
and a regional indian ocean society, affiliated internationally?
the precedent already exists. in the eastern caribbean several micro-states share a single regional society, ECCO, based in saint lucia and a CISAC member. that is precisely the model for pooled collective management between small islands. one caveat worth knowing: réunion and mayotte are french territory and therefore already covered by SACEM · any regional body would have to work around that.
can we tell venues to stop paying MASA and collect ourselves?
no, and it is the riskiest idea on the table. a venue playing music needs authorisation for all the music it plays. MASA covers its own repertoire and that of 43 foreign societies · so the moment one track from that pool is played, the licence is needed. telling a business to stop paying exposes it personally to an infringement claim, and exposes us to having induced it. it should not be done.
and if myt played our music in its outlets and paid the artists directly?
here, yes · and it is legally different. this is not collective management, it is a contract between two parties. where a label genuinely holds the rights to a catalogue · the recording and the publishing, with no co-writer mandated elsewhere · it can license that catalogue directly to a user, who pays the label, which pays its artists under their contracts. this is the in-store background music model, used the world over.
so where is the limit?
it is a clean line. a wholly controlled catalogue can be licensed directly. the moment a single rightsholder in a track has mandated MASA · a co-writer, a publisher · the society’s licence is needed again. and an outlet playing anything else alongside it still has to cover the rest. so the honest route is not "stop paying", it is "here is a clean, fully cleared catalogue whose payment chain is visible". it does not replace the society · it demonstrates what transparency looks like.
and if every artist withdrew their works from MASA?
this is the most important question on this page, and the answer is one line of law deleted in 2017.
the Copyright Act 2014, as passed, said at section 42 that rights could be managed by "(a) an individual right holder or his lawfully authorised agent under a written contract of agency or power of attorney" or "(b) the Society". in other words, you could manage your own rights, or have an agent do it for you.
then came the Copyright (Amendment) Act 2017. section 20, word for word: "Section 42 of the principal Act is amended by repealing paragraph (a)."
so only (b) remains. the Society. the option that would have made withdrawal useful was deleted in 2017 · not by CISAC, not by a treaty, not by any international obligation. by an amendment passed in mauritius.
so withdrawal is pointless?
no · but be clear about what it produces. you can withdraw your mandate, that is your right. your rights then return to you individually, and you have to deal with every user one at a time · every radio, every hotel, every mall. and you lose access to the 43 reciprocal agreements, so money earned abroad stops arriving.
that is why mass withdrawal is leverage, not a solution. it only has force if an alternative already works. the order matters: build first, measure first, prove it works · then withdrawal is a choice rather than a leap into nothing.
so what is the simplest reform?
restore section 42(a). one paragraph. the one that already existed and was deleted in 2017.
this is not a rewrite of mauritian copyright law. it is not the creation of a new society with a whole licensing regime attached. it is putting back a sentence parliament itself passed in 2014, which gave rightsholders the right to manage their own works, alone or through an agent.
it is the cheapest ask, the easiest to defend, and the one that changes the most.
and the elected seats?
the same 2017 amendment raised the elected seats from 3 to 7, chosen from the categories set out in the Schedule. that is a genuine improvement. but it added this: "Where no nomination is received for the election of members in any category, the Minister shall appoint a member for that category."
put plainly, if elections are not held, or nobody stands, those seats pass to the Minister. not voting does not leave a seat empty · it transfers it. the same section provides that "the composition of the Board shall be published in the Gazette", so the composition is meant to be public.
the thing people get wrong
people often say there can only be one society per country, and that CISAC requires it. that is not true. CISAC’s statutes contain no such clause · they set criteria about how an organisation is run, not about territorial exclusivity. CISAC has 227 member societies across 120 countries, close to two per country on average.
better still: in 2008 the european commission found the model-contract clause that stopped one society accepting another’s member to be anticompetitive. and coexistence is the norm, including in small countries · france has SACEM and SACD, ireland at least four, jamaica three, kenya three, south africa four, and the united states has four competing bodies over the same repertoire. european law even recognises independent management entities run for profit, and hungary is in the process of removing its legal monopoly.
WIPO is explicit that the choice between monopoly and competition is a matter of national policy, not an international rule. in other words, nobody outside is stopping mauritius from having more than one body. it is a decision taken here.
three pillars. nothing more complicated than that.
it is also the norm everywhere else · SUISA is a member cooperative, PRS is owned by its members, ASCAP is a membership association, SACEM is a société civile whose associates are the writers and publishers. the exception is here: in mauritius artists elect 7 seats out of 16 on the board of the body holding their money.
★ and it answers the question we get asked directly: why would the state build a system it does not properly fund, when the people that system pays could hold it themselves? when members set the deduction, elect the board and can remove it, the institution has nowhere to hide. control is the only transparency mechanism that lasts.
in practice that means: one person, one vote · the deduction rate voted by members and published · elections held on schedule · accounts anyone can read · and the right for a member to export their data and leave. if we build the tool and then refuse to let go of it, we will have replaced a problem with the same problem.
it is not paid to somebody else. it is not absorbed into costs. it does not become, after three years, a line to be shared out among those who happened to already be registered. not being registered becomes an admin problem, not a permanent loss. and the day the artist, or their family, comes forward, there is something to hand over and a record of what it is for.
when a system like this is proposed, the figures put forward run into millions. here is what the components actually cost.
the figures in circulation, heard and unverified, put roughly rs 8 million on building a platform with member registration, and rs 3 million a year on hosting it locally. we repeat them as market talk, not as established fact · unlike everything else on this page, they come from no public document. but the order of magnitude is worth setting against the real bill.
rs 3 million a year would work out at rs 250,000 a month for hosting. a server that runs all of this costs between rs 1,000 and rs 5,000 a month. if those figures are accurate, the gap is not a few percent, it is a factor of fifty or more · and anyone putting such a number forward should be able to itemise it, line by line.
and the part that matters most: the measurement layer already exists, built and running, with a public catalogue of 3,663 works and three stations where every play is logged, timestamped and exportable. cost was never the real barrier.
the honest total
about a month of work.
with the tools available today, the software is no longer the hard part. a database, member registration, a catalogue, a play log, an exportable statement · that is a month of focused work, not a multi-million rupee procurement. what used to justify those figures, years of bespoke development, no longer exists.
and to be precise about what that month covers. the website itself · the pages, the registration form, the member area · can be rebuilt today in a matter of hours. the month is for the working parts: measuring what plays, tying every play to a work and its rightsholders, and producing a statement that stands up in front of an accountant. that is the base system, and it is genuinely about a month.
★ but building the base system and digitising MASA are two different jobs, and it would be dishonest to blur them. the platform is a month. taking on what the society already holds · decades of deposited works, member files, historical claims, in whatever condition those records are in · is another matter entirely. nobody can scope it honestly without first seeing the state of the data. and what a team should be paid for that work is a separate question, and a fair one.
so what we are offering is specific: the month that builds the base, and the measurement layer that already exists. our team has the knowledge, the servers, the tools and telecom support, and is willing to put in the time and the energy. we are not asking to be paid to get this started · we are asking that it be done, and we are ready to build it with anyone willing to do the same.
in 2014 the law let an artist manage their own rights. in 2017 that sentence was deleted.
section 42 said rights could be managed "by an individual right holder or his lawfully authorised agent, or by the Society". the 2017 amendment repealed that first limb, in a single line. since 14 december 2017 the Society is the only manager named in the law. the word "exclusive" appears nowhere.
in one sentence: reopening the door means amending the 2014 act, principally section 42, together with the sections tied to it and the regulations made under it. this is not a technical detail, it is a political decision · and that is exactly the kind of decision that gets made when enough people ask for it.
none of this moves because a document exists. it moves because enough people show up at the same time.
what already exists and is not being used
the law provides for three members to sit on the board, elected by the membership, for three-year terms. the statutes set out those elections. anger is understandable, but it is not leverage · the leverage is the machinery that already exists and that nobody has made work. elections have not been held. that is something you can demand, date, and follow.
and there is a reason to move now. under the statutes, five consecutive years without payment makes you a Dormant Member · you lose your vote and your right to stand. put plainly, not being paid eventually strips you of the power to change why you are not being paid. that is the single most important link on this page.
and there is a legal route to get these answers
section 48A. the minister can require it.
we wrote earlier that mauritius has no Freedom of Information Act, and that is correct. but the 2017 amendment inserted a section few people know about, section 48A, "Directions by Minister":
"(2) The Minister may require the Society to furnish such information in such manner and at such time as he thinks necessary in respect of its activities and the Society shall supply such information."
and subsection (1) adds that the Minister may give written directions of a general character "as he considers necessary in the public interest, and the Society shall comply with those directions".
★ that changes what the ask is. the questions on this page · publish the list of 200 titles, publish the register of works, publish the management remuneration the auditor records as absent from the accounts · do not need a new law. they need a minister to use a power he has held since 2017. and "the Society shall supply" is not a discretion, it is an obligation.
so this is the cheapest ask on the whole page, and it is addressed to the minister responsible for copyright rather than to the society itself. one parliamentary question is enough to put it on the record.
what you can actually do
check your status. ask in writing whether you are a member, whether your works are on deposit, and whether you are classed dormant. keep the answer, or the absence of one.
ask for your statement. not an amount · the detail. which track, which source, how many plays, at what rate.
ask for the list. the 200 titles used in the last distribution. it is not a secret, it is the basis of a calculation that concerns you.
sign below. one signature is nothing. a thousand is a political fact.
and if you have skills · legal, accounting, technical, or simply time to reach other artists, write to us. that is what is missing most.
what we are not asking for
we are not naming individuals and we will not. that is not caution, it is strategy · a page that attacks people gets settled in a courtroom, a page that quotes public documents gets settled on facts. everything above stands without one name being spoken. that is exactly what makes it hard to dismiss.
the aim is not to bring an institution down. it is a system where what plays is known, measured, and the money follows. if MASA does that, good · we will have built the tool for nothing and nobody will complain.
sign. stand with the artists of mauritius.
a transparent register, distribution based on what actually plays, no local artist forgotten.
read them yourself. all of it is public.
- copyright act 2014, the full text →
- copyright (amendment) act 2017 · the repeal of section 42(a) →
- copyright (fees) regulations 2020 · the tariffs →
- copyright (fees) amendment regulations 2021 →
- MASA rules · deductions, distribution, membership →
- MASA statutes 2018 · the log sheet obligation →
- MASA annual report 2017 · 2018 →
- national audit office · annual reports →
- independent broadcasting authority act 2000 →
- MASA · the institution + membership →
figures from the national assembly (hansard), the national audit office, the fees regulations, and MASA’s own rules, statutes and reports. the 2025 and 2026 items come from the national press and are marked as such.
who is speaking
artists, musicians, producers.
we are not consultants and we are not a software company. we make music. among us, one house running five labels · BABANI, BAD, ZANANA, ë • music, Mutewax · with 147 releases and 105 artists and acts between them, built over about twenty years. we are precisely the people this system is meant to pay · which is how we know where its holes are, and why we are offering to close them.
but none of this belongs to a company or to any one person. it is shared work to get this country’s music counted, correctly registered, and paid to the people who make it. the tools are shared, the figures are public, and there is room for anyone who wants to contribute · artists, producers, publishers, labels, radios, institutions. by mauritians, for mauritius.