Indonesia rewrites how music royalties are split, and says live streams can owe them too

Indonesia's National Collective Management Institution (LMKN) has published new rules for how song and music royalties are shared out in 2026. The decree, SK No. 001.SK.LMKN.IV.2026, came out of a meeting at LMKN's Jakarta office on 15 April. LMKN announced it the next day. It replaces the decree that governed 2025 distributions, and LMKN says money already paid under the old rules stays valid. The principle, in LMKN's words, is distribution "based on the availability and quality of music usage data" (our translation).

That sounds like housekeeping. But together with two other recent moves, live-stream royalties and a regional pact with other South-East Asian collecting societies, it changes who gets paid for music used in Indonesia.

What does the 2026 decree actually change?

The decree puts all usage into one of two groups, LMKN says:

• Log sheet. Where a music user (a venue, broadcaster or platform) reports what it played, royalties go out directly on that data.
• Non-log sheet. Where no data is reported, LMKN falls back on sampling, proxy methods and a new Unlogged Performance Allocation (UPA).

UPA is paid through each member society (LMK) to creators, copyright holders and related-rights owners. It is split equally among each society's registered members. It also has a cap: a member who gets only UPA, with no data-based payment, for two periods in a row loses UPA in the next period. Each society's overall share is worked out from the royalty tariffs paid by the different categories of commercial user. LMKN's article gives no percentages and says the weightings are in the decree's attachment, which we haven't seen.

LMKN's two chairs, Andi Mulhanan Tombolotutu for creators and Marcell Siahaan for related-rights owners, told ANTARA that the point is fairness through data, and that data quality decides what rights holders receive. They also asked music users to report usage more consistently.

Do TikTok and YouTube live streams really owe royalties now?

LMKN says yes, at least in principle. In February, LMKN commissioner Suyud Margono told ANTARA that copyrighted music in live streams and video streams on platforms such as TikTok and YouTube can owe royalties. He said this falls under "digital commercial users" in Minister of Law Regulation (Permenkum) No. 27 of 2025. He added that digital use is easier to collect on because the platforms record it, and said LMKN had collected Rp88 billion in digital royalties up to September 2025.

The text of the regulation lists audio and video streaming, downloads, simulcasts and webcasts, video on demand, online radio and live event streaming as commercial public services. It also lets LMKN sign agreements with foreign digital platforms. The regulation already had a cost. WAMI, one of the member societies, said its third distribution of 2025 was pushed back from November because royalties now have to pass through LMKN verification before members are paid, Republika reported. WAMI did eventually distribute Rp36.9 billion for that period.

Who pays for a live stream is still unclear. The regulation puts the duty on the business owner or event organiser, while the platform deals are left to agreements LMKN hasn't published. A creator playing someone else's song on a TikTok Live is the obvious edge case, and nothing we read settles it.

Where does the ASEAN pact fit?

On 9–10 April in Bali, collecting societies including Malaysia's PPM, Thailand's PNR and MCT, the Philippines' FILSCAP and LMKN agreed four points. They will:

• work towards a shared regional position on AI, covering training on members' works and how revenue from AI platforms is shared;
• keep cooperating with each other and with governments in the region;
• set minimum standards for digital royalty governance, covering transparent reporting, accountable distribution and fair deals with platforms;
• make the forum a permanent body with regular meetings.

The societies themselves named mismatched metadata and fragmented copyright administration as the structural problems.

What we think

The decree is the right idea, but it puts the cost of missing data on the people least able to fix it. Venues, broadcasters and platforms produce the logs, not songwriters. Yet under UPA it is the member whose songs never appear in a log who loses the fallback after two periods. Think of a writer whose songs are played mostly in small cafés and regional venues that never submit play data. That writer can be cut off for someone else's paperwork. We'd like LMKN to show how many members currently get UPA only, and to publish the attachment with the weightings.

The likely winners are songs that already live on platforms. Streams and live streams leave a record, and analog public performance often doesn't. So a data-first system will probably move money towards catalogues with strong digital lives and away from music that earns in rooms. That is our inference: LMKN hasn't published modelling of the effect, and someone should. Paying the most-tracked songs more is not fairness in itself.

There's also a fight over who should run this. In October 2025, seven songwriters filed a judicial review at the Supreme Court against parts of Government Regulation 56/2021 and Permenkum 27/2025, detikPop reported. They argue that LMKN as now set up goes beyond what the Copyright Law allows, and that its membership is mostly civil servants rather than musicians. We couldn't confirm the outcome. Even so, a data-driven system run by a body some songwriters don't see as theirs will need unusually open reporting to win their trust.

The non-obvious link is between the decree and the AI ask in Bali. A society that wants a share of AI platform revenue needs to show whose works were used, and how much. It can only do that if its usage data is good. In that light, LMKN's decree is a test of whether South-East Asia's societies can count usage accurately at all. If they can't track a song through a Jakarta café, they will struggle to track it through a training set.

What artists in Indonesia can do now: check that every work is registered with your society with clean metadata, including co-writers and splits. If you're on platforms, keep your releases' identifiers consistent, because those are what any log-based match will use. And if your society's statements show UPA-only payments two periods running, ask why, before the cut-off applies.