When a familiar name stops carrying legal weight
Kenya’s royalty system did not simply change names. It changed authority.
For years, the Music Copyright Society of Kenya (MCSK) was one of the most recognisable names in the country’s collective management landscape. By the turn into 2026, though, recognition was no longer the same thing as legal power. A mix of regulatory action, tribunal decisions and court rulings had left MCSK without authority to collect or distribute royalties for the 2025–2026 licensing period, while the Performing and Audio-Visual Rights Society of Kenya (PAVRISK) and KAMP Copyright and Related Rights were the entities KECOBO had licensed to operate.
That distinction is more than administrative. In any royalty market, creators, users and rights-holders need to know who can lawfully issue an invoice, who can collect, and who can actually turn that money into distributions. In Kenya, that clarity had become blurred by overlapping claims, legal disputes and long-running trust concerns. By late 2025 and into 2026, the system began forcing a harder answer.
How the system narrowed
The reset did not arrive in one dramatic move. It happened in stages, each one shrinking the space in which MCSK could operate.
In April 2025, KECOBO said it was complying with court and tribunal decisions by issuing six-month conditional provisional licences to three CMOs: KAMP, PAVRISK and MCSK. Even then, the signal was clear. These were not routine renewals. The provisional licences came with strict conditions around member verification, public reporting, ICT-based collection and evidence of distribution under the 70/30 rule. Governance, traceability and payout discipline were being placed at the centre of the market.
By June 2025, the position had tightened. KECOBO publicly stated that only two CMOs, PAVRISK and KAMP, had been licensed, and that MCSK’s licence had been withheld. It also made the practical consequence plain: royalty collection without a valid KECOBO licence was illegal, and only invoices issued by licensed CMOs were valid for users seeking to avoid double payment. At that point, the issue was no longer only about sector politics. It became a market instruction.
That line hardened again in October 2025. Reporting on KECOBO’s 2025 licensing cycle confirmed one-year licences for PAVRISK and KAMP, effective from 5 November 2025, while MCSK was among the unsuccessful applicants. The conditions remained strict: updated member data, approved ICT systems, trust-account controls and compliance with the direct-allocation rule. The operating field was narrowing, but it was also being rebuilt around proof.
When the courts made the message unavoidable
The courts did not simply echo the regulator’s position. They made its market impact harder to ignore.
In December 2025, reporting showed that the High Court declined to suspend the Copyright Tribunal decision barring MCSK from collecting and distributing royalties, leaving that restriction in place pending a fuller hearing scheduled for July 2026. Then, in February 2026, reporting indicated that the High Court went further, saying MCSK could not demand licence, copyright or usage fees until it was properly licensed, and warning that continued collection attempts would be unlawful.
That sequence turned a licensing dispute into a practical instruction for the market. Venues, broadcasters, businesses and other music users had firmer legal grounds for refusing payment demands from MCSK during that period. For creators, the question shifted too. The issue was no longer whether the old system was familiar, but whether the new one would prove more credible.
Who still had room to operate
PAVRISK emerged as the clearest society with operating room in 2026. Reporting around its renewed licence positioned it as authorised to manage royalty collection and distribution in music and audio-visual sectors, subject to the same compliance conditions KECOBO had stressed throughout the year. Just as importantly, PAVRISK had already shown at least one public sign that collections were moving through to members: a reported first royalty payout of KSh24.018 million in September 2025.
KAMP also remained active, though in a more specific rights lane. Its licensing was tied to sound recording producers’ rights, and reporting in 2025 pointed to interim royalty distributions from collections made earlier that year. So the post-MCSK period was not a vacuum. Kenya did not become a royalty-free zone, nor did rights administration stop. Instead, the environment became narrower, more regulated and more explicit about who was authorised to do what.
That matters because collective management systems often get discussed as though every CMO performs the same role. They do not. Mandates differ, rights categories differ, and in periods of legal dispute those distinctions become even more important. What 2026 revealed was not only a fight over institutional survival, but a sharper insistence that authority and compliance must be visible.
Why this became a trust story
The legal changes are the headline. The deeper story is trust.
When a collecting society loses authority, the damage does not stop with that organisation. The whole market feels it. Creators start asking whether their registrations are in the right place. Users begin wondering whether they are being invoiced lawfully. Licensees become cautious about paying the wrong party. Even when the regulator’s position is clear, confidence does not automatically return.
That helps explain why KECOBO kept returning to the same themes: member verification, approved ICT systems, ring-fenced accounts, public reporting and the 70/30 rule. These are not cosmetic requirements. They are the infrastructure of trust. In practice, governance problems often appear first as data problems: incomplete member records, uncertain mandates, weak repertoire information, delayed reporting and distributions that members struggle to reconcile.
So while the legal outcome around MCSK was significant, it was not the end of the story. The harder test for Kenya’s royalty system in 2026 is whether the licensed CMOs can prove, month by month, that they are better at the less glamorous work: maintaining accurate data, monitoring usage credibly, invoicing lawfully, distributing on time and issuing statements members can actually understand.
The wider lesson for rights-holders
For creators, rights-holders and neighbouring-rights participants across the continent, Kenya’s shake-up offers a useful systems lesson. A royalty market does not run on familiarity alone. It runs on mandate, compliance and administration that can withstand scrutiny.
That means the first question is no longer who has the loudest profile, but who has the lawful authority to act. The second is whether the data trail holds up: member records, works registrations, repertoire details and documented mandates. The third is whether collection is actually translating into distribution with a transparent audit path.
In other words, collection authority is only the starting point. The real measure of a functioning system is whether money moves through that authority cleanly enough for creators to believe in it.
Kenya’s CMO reset may have begun as a dispute over licensing, but in 2026 it looks more like a wider reckoning with what credible rights administration should require. The organisations that emerge strongest will not simply be the ones that survived the courtroom phase. They will be the ones that can prove they know where the rights sit, where the money came from, and where it is supposed to go.
Credits
- Kenya Copyright Board — Licensing of Collective Management Organisations (CMOs) for 2025
- Kenya Copyright Board public update on licensed collecting management organisations
- KBC Digital — PAVRISK received clearance from KECOBO to manage royalties
- The Star — High Court declines to suspend MCSK’s royalty collection ban
- Music In Africa — Kenya: High Court bars MCSK from collecting music fees
- Music In Africa — Kenya’s PAVRISK distributes $186k in first royalty pay-out
