The Copyright Society of Malawi (COSOMA) has made royalty payments to artists and rights owners for the period June to December 2020 which has seen Atoht Manje top the list with a whooping payment of K2,166,541.98. The artists was closely followed by RnB crooner Kelly Kay while Saint came in third.
COSOMA has been heavily criticized for not being transparent enough with their royalty distributions in the past owing to the fact that they did not have a legitimate basis for determining distributions since many radio DJ’s no longer log any songs they play for submission to COSOMA to use in the Royalty distribution process.
While many have welcomed the bigger payouts mainly generated from the Blank Media Levy which COSOMA collects via the Malawi Revenue Authority (MRA) from all electronic storage media devices that are imported into the country, he system to determine who rightly deserves how much is still far from perfect and it seems COSOMA may still be using its “Black Box” technique to determine royalty distributions.
The disbursed royalties are from the Blank Media Levy for the period of July 2020 to December 2020. 3,640 works and a total of 1,055 artists have benefited from money amounting to K212,984,478.01.
Here is the list of top paid Malawian musicians by Royalty earnings
1. Atoht Manje
2. Kell Kay
3. Saint
4. Lucius Banda
5. Wikise
6. Dan Lu
7. Eli Njuchi
8. Billy Kaunda
9. Lulu
10. Skeffa Chimoto
11. Macelba
12. Janta
13. Gwamba
14. Martse
15. Patience Namadingo
