The MCSN history is a forty-year account of persistence against institutional resistance; court battles, licence withdrawals, petitions, and a founder who refused to quit.
Before 1984: Music Without Rights Management
After independence in 1960 and the passage of Nigeria’s first indigenous Copyright Act in 1970, the Performing Rights Society of the United Kingdom (PRS) was still effectively running music royalty collection in Nigeria through a Lagos-based law firm, Giwa and Atilade and Co.
Alhaji Fatai Oladele Giwa, the principal partner, had secured the PRS agency for Nigeria and was licensing music use on their behalf. The system worked, after Nigerian artists like Chief Ebenezer Obey, Victor Uwaifo, Sunny Ade, and others were joining PRS as members and receiving royalty cheques from London in pounds sterling. Nigeria itself, though, was paying nothing into the international system.
What was missing was a Nigerian institution. Music users were refusing to deal with a foreign body. The musicians themselves were calling for something of their own. And Alhaji Giwa, balancing a busy law practice with the demands of running a PRS agency, needed someone to take over the work professionally.
1984: The Birth of MCSN
The man who took on that responsibility was Mayo Ayilaran, a young political science graduate from the University of Ife who had been introduced to copyright administration by Chief Alfred Alabi, an accountant who represented MCPS of the United Kingdom in Nigeria. Alabi sent him to Giwa, and from a shared desk in Giwa’s law chambers, Ayilaran began to learn the business.
The Musical Copyright Society Nigeria was formally registered on 20 July 1984 as a company limited by guarantee, set up to administer the public performance rights of musicians in Nigeria. In 1986, a contract of reciprocal representation was signed between PRS and MCSN, formally replacing the earlier agency arrangement. Alhaji Giwa gave MCSN its first office space. For several years, Ayilaran ran the organisation largely alone.
By 1988, four years in, MCSN had expanded its operations, built international relationships, and established itself within both CISAC, the global federation of CMOs, and BIEM, the international organisation for mechanical rights. The Nigerian music rights infrastructure, still informal in many ways, had an international footprint before it had a domestic regulator.
The First Challenges: Legal Battles and Recognition
When news came that government was establishing the Nigerian Copyright Commission (NCC) to oversee copyright matters, Ayilaran led MCSN’s management team to the NCC’s National Theatre office to congratulate the new officials. He expected an ally. What he got was something else entirely.
The NCC’s opening position was that it had not approved any society and did not recognise MCSN’s existing operations. Between 1989 and 1992, copyright administration in Nigeria was effectively in limbo. When the NCC finally published registration guidelines, MCSN applied immediately, supplying every document requested. They were refused.
The approval went instead to a newly formed organisation called the Performing and Mechanical Rights Society of Nigeria, PMRS. It was later discovered that NCC staff members sat on PMRS’s board of directors. MCSN filed a petition with the relevant government authority. Then it went to court. A judge granted MCSN a window to continue operating as a recognised body.
This was the beginning of what would become a long chain of legal actions. Over the following years, MCSN won landmark cases in Nigerian courts. In MCSN v Nigeria Hotels (1992), MCSN v Adeokin Records (2004), and MCSN v Vee Networks Ltd (2009) at the Federal High Court, the courts consistently held that MCSN was the owner, assignee, and exclusive licensee of the largest repertoire of musical works in Nigeria, representing over ten million composers and songwriters worldwide through its agreements with PRS and CISAC member societies.
The courts repeatedly confirmed MCSN’s legal standing as the dominant rights holder in Nigeria. The courts also repeatedly blocked MCSN from enforcing those rights because it lacked a collecting society registration. The law created a bind: MCSN had the rights but not the approval. PMRS had the approval but not the rights.
A Hard-Won Licence: The Struggle for Official Recognition
In May 2005, a new NCC Director-General, Adebambo Adewopo, granted MCSN a licence to operate alongside PMRS. It lasted five months.
Under pressure from PMRS, which petitioned the government, the approval was withdrawn in October 2005. MCSN campaigned for Adewopo’s reinstatement after he was suspended. He was reinstated, but the licence was never revalidated.
By 2010, a new round of CMO registrations had come and gone. The approved society was the Copyright Society of Nigeria (COSON), formed when PMRS changed its name in September 2009. MCSN, with four decades of membership, the largest international repertoire in the country, and court-recognised ownership of millions of musical works, was again excluded.
Courts had consistently held that MCSN was the owner, assignee, and exclusive licensee of the largest repertoire of musical works in Nigeria through its reciprocal agreement with PRS, representing over ten million composers and songwriters worldwide. Yet it remained without a government licence to enforce those rights.
Resolution and Recognition
In April 2017, the Attorney General of the Federation directed the NCC to approve MCSN as a collective management organisation. After more than two decades of legal battles, petitions, court wins, and regulatory reversals, the approval was finally secured.
In 2019, the Nigerian Copyright Commission formally confirmed MCSN as the only body authorised to collect and distribute royalties for musical works and sound recordings in Nigeria, giving it the statutory authority it had been pursuing since 1989.
MCSN history in Nigeria: where the organisation stands today
Today MCSN is the only NCC-approved Collective Management Organisation for musical works and sound recordings in Nigeria. The organisation has moved to a log-based royalty distribution model, meaning payments are tied to verified usage data rather than estimates. Broadcasters submit cue sheets. DSP feeds provide play counts. MCSN matches usage to registered works and distributes.
The gap between where MCSN was in 1984 and where it is today is measurable in those numbers. In 1984, there was no system, no tracking, no collection, no distribution. Today, over 38,000 creators have a formal stake in a national royalty infrastructure. That infrastructure exists because one organisation refused to stop building it, regardless of what was thrown at it.
