Where are the Royalties for musicians Cosoma?

The fact that the issue of royalties keep coming means the Copyright Society of Malawi (Cosoma) is yet to be transparent in its dealings over this matter or that it lacks a good publicity machinery that can always churn out information that leaves no grey areas.

Just this week I was tagged on Facebook by musician Khuzah Rampi who had no kind words for Cosoma. His story is that since 2001 he has been realising albums and performing lives shows across the country. He says he recorded his first songs with the late Chuma Soko followed by others that he did with late DD Nyirenda, late Charles Foster, Ralph Records, Uncle Lai, Bathwa Maestro Flobud, Limbani Chibwana and many other top producers. His songs have enjoyed massive airplay on different radio stations in Malawi. He mentioned several radio personalities that have played his music.

He bemoans that for the period of 18 years that he has been in the music industry Cosoma has never given him a penny through royalties. All what they claim he says is that the broadcasters do not log his songs in the sheet.

He now borrows from gospel artist Princess Chitsulo who once wrote that their number one enemy in music industry is Cosoma. Rampi calls it a monster that has been milking musicians for decades.

He now rallies support from fellow musicians and other talented artists to fight Cosoma.

Cosoma executive director, Dora Makwinja once told me that in the past, they used to keep data on sales of music by authorized distributors especially those that they had given licenses.

She said when Afri Music Company (OG Issah) was in the business of producing and distributing music, they used to have a good database of record sales and even for others who were also in the same business because there was some kind of control.

Now, with parallel markets where musicians are also selling their own musical works, she said it was difficult to have a complete data of the record sales and therefore there is a huge loss of royalty collection.

Before, she said the system was beneficial to musicians like in 2009 when one musician Lawrence Mbenjere set a new record when he became the first musician to cart home money in excess of over K2.5 million in royalties.

There were also challenges in collection especially in broadcasting royalties, where some radio station including the state owned broadcaster the Malawi Broadcasting Corporation (MBC) would fail to remit the royalties and at one time in 2013 MBC owed Cosoma K8 million.

Cosoma Senior Licensing Officer Rosario Kamanga once said since the Malawi Communication Regulatory Authority (Macra) commissioned the Consolidated ICT Regulatory Management System (CIRMS), otherwise also known as the Spy Machine management of broadcasting royalties would now be easy because other broadcasting institutions were neither logging the number of times they had played music of artists nor indicating at all whether they had played it or not.

With the Spy Machine in full gear I wonder what more excuses Cosoma will bring to the fore.

I responded to the Facebook post that I have written countless times on the questionable conduct of Cosoma and spineless administration of the leadership of the musicians. I stated that unless they wake up and act, the media can only do so much. We can criticize Cosoma and Mum but if the artists remain docile as they have demonstrated they will remain trapped in poverty.

I always argue that why foreign artists should become instant millionaires with a single hit but we have artists like Stonard Lungu, who died a pauper when he was a legend. He had cancer but still performed to raise funds for his medical bills. In other countries he sure would have been able to fly to any expensive hospital in the world because his body of work is a treasure trove.

Bob Marley died in 1981 but he is still making millions each and every passing month through royalties. Now we have many radio and TV stations, buses and minibuses, a lot of pubs, playing local music which by now should have translated into millions for musicians. What is wrong? When did Cosoma conduct royalty presentation ceremony as they used to do with the Nkasas and Mbenjeres that time? Unless musicians wake up, other people will become instant millionaires using their talent just like we have seen it happening in the past.