Some people think MCSN is a recent organisation. It is not. It has been running for four decades, through military rule, the cassette era, the CD era, and now streaming. Here is what those 40 years actually look like.
Before streaming existed and the internet changed everything about how music moved around the world, Nigerian musicians were still making music, and that music was still being played, copied, performed, and sold.
Most of that activity happened without anyone tracking it. Radio stations played songs and paid nothing to the people who wrote them. Venues hosted live performances and kept the money. Records were pressed and sold, and the composers saw little of it.
That was the reality of the Nigerian music economy in the early 1980s. And it is exactly the problem that MCSN was created to solve.
1984: The founding
The Musical Copyright Society Nigeria was established in 1984, at a time when Nigeria’s creative industry had no formal system for collecting and distributing music royalties. There was no mechanism to ensure that a composer earned money when their work was performed on state radio. No structure to ensure a publisher saw revenue when their catalogue was reproduced.
MCSN was set up to be that mechanism. From the beginning, its mandate was the same three things it still does today: license music use, monitor usage, and distribute royalties to the people who created the music.
The context matters. Nigeria in 1984 was under military rule, the creative industry was largely informal, and copyright enforcement was not a priority for most institutions. Starting a rights management organisation in that environment required both legal groundwork and institutional persistence.
Four decades of growth — a timeline
MCSN’s history is not a straight line. It is a story of an organisation that had to keep reinventing how it operated as Nigeria’s music industry changed around it.
| 1984
Founding |
MCSN is established as Nigeria’s Collective Management Organisation for musical works and sound recordings. The organisation begins the work of building a membership base and establishing licensing relationships with broadcasters. |
| 1990s
Analogue era |
Nigeria’s cassette market is one of the largest in Africa. MCSN works to establish mechanical rights collection — ensuring that composers receive royalties when their compositions are reproduced on physical formats. Radio broadcasting, now the dominant medium for music discovery, becomes a key licensing focus. |
| 2000s
Legal battles |
As Nigeria’s music industry grows commercially, so does the scale of unlicensed use. MCSN pursues legal action against music users who refuse to obtain licences, establishing important precedents under the Nigerian Copyright Act. The organisation also begins building relationships with international CMO networks. |
| 2008
CISAC membership |
MCSN becomes a member of CISAC — the Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers — the global federation of over 225 CMOs operating across 116 countries. This membership establishes reciprocal agreements that allow Nigerian creators to receive royalties from international usage of their music. |
| 2010s
Digital shift |
The smartphone changes everything. Nigerian music consumption moves online. MCSN begins working to establish licensing relationships with digital platforms and adapts its monitoring systems to capture data from streaming services. The complexity of rights management grows significantly as usage moves beyond broadcast. |
| 2019
NCC approval |
The Nigerian Copyright Commission formally approves MCSN as the only body authorised to collect and distribute royalties for musical works and sound recordings in Nigeria. This approval gives MCSN statutory authority — it is no longer just an industry organisation, but a legally empowered collective management body. |
| 2022+
Log-based model |
MCSN transitions to a log-based royalty distribution system. Instead of distributing based on estimates or sampling, payments are now directly tied to verified usage data. Cue sheets from broadcasters, DSP play counts, and monitored usage logs determine what each creator earns. Over 2,500 licences issued in this period. |
| 2024–25
Digital platform |
MCSN begins development of RightsHub — a full digital platform for membership management, work registration, licence applications, and royalty distribution. The move to a fully digital infrastructure is the most significant operational change in the organisation’s history. |
What NCC approval actually means
In 2019, the Nigerian Copyright Commission formally recognised MCSN as the only body authorised to operate as a CMO for music in Nigeria. This was not a small administrative step.
The NCC sits under the Federal Ministry of Justice. Its mandate is to administer the Nigerian Copyright Act and protect the rights of creators. When the NCC approves a CMO, it is extending its own legal authority to that organisation. The approved body can license music use on behalf of rights holders, and those licences carry legal weight.
Before this approval, the question of whether any music organisation had genuine statutory backing was less clear. After it, the position of MCSN became unambiguous. There is one approved CMO for music in Nigeria. It is MCSN.
For creators, this matters because it means the body collecting royalties on their behalf has government-backed legitimacy. For businesses, it means a licence from MCSN is the only licence that provides genuine legal protection for their music use.
Nigeria’s connection to the global rights system
MCSN’s CISAC membership, established in 2008, is one of its most important but least understood achievements.
CISAC coordinates a global network of music rights organisations. Member CMOs have reciprocal agreements with each other — when music plays in a country, the local CMO collects the royalty and routes it to the creator’s home CMO, who distributes it.
In practical terms, this means that when a Nigerian song plays on the radio in France, Spotify in the United Kingdom, or a venue in South Africa, the royalty generated by that play does not disappear. It is collected by the local CMO and sent to MCSN, who distributes it to the registered Nigerian creator.
For Afrobeats artists, gospel musicians, and anyone whose music has crossed Nigeria’s borders, this infrastructure is the difference between international success that pays and international success that does not.
MCSN today: the numbers
Four decades in, MCSN is the largest music rights organisation Nigeria has ever had. The scale of its current operation reflects both the growth of the Nigerian music industry and the cumulative work of building a membership and licensing base over 40 years.
| 38,054+
Registered members |
450,000+
Songs in catalogue |
N1.082bn+
Paid in royalties |
2,500+
Licences since 2022 |
These numbers represent more than organisational growth. They represent the scale of the problem MCSN was created to solve — and the progress made against it.
In 1984, there was no system. Royalties were not tracked, not collected, and not distributed. Today, over 38,000 creators have a formal stake in a national royalty system. Their music is catalogued. Their usage is monitored. When platforms pay, the money reaches them.
It is still imperfect. Not every usage is captured. Not every creator who should be registered has registered. Not every licence that should be in place is in place. But the infrastructure exists — which is something that simply was not true before 1984.
The next 40 years
MCSN’s biggest operational challenge for most of its history has been infrastructure. A physical membership process. Manual work submission. Paper-based licence applications. A royalty distribution model that depended on broadcasters submitting cue sheets by post.
That era is ending. MCSN is building RightsHub — a fully digital platform that will allow creators to register, submit works, track royalties, and download statements online. Businesses will apply for licences, pay, and receive their certificates digitally. Royalty processing will become faster and more transparent.
The log-based distribution model already introduced in recent years is the proof of direction. Payments tied directly to verified usage data. Detailed statements that show every creator where their earnings came from — which station, which platform, how many plays, what rate.
The ambition for the next decade is a Nigerian music rights system that operates at the standard of the best CMOs in the world. Where a creator in Ibadan registers a song on Monday and, when that song plays on a licensed platform on Tuesday, the path from play to payment is automatic, verified, and transparent.
Forty years ago, no such system existed. Today, the foundation is in place. The work now is building on it.
| Be part of the next chapter.
MCSN has spent 40 years building the infrastructure for Nigerian creators to earn what they are owed. The next era — faster, more transparent, fully digital — is already underway. Join the system. Join MCSN at mcsn.ng/join | Get a licence at mcsn.ng/licensing |
