When music plays everywhere but artists remain poor, something in the system is fundamentally broken.
Imagine a national tollgate system that never closes. Every commuter pays every day, yet the roads remain riddled with potholes, accidents increase, and no visible improvements are made. When motorists complain, they are met with silence, technical explanations, or reports they never see.
For many Zimbabwean artists, this is exactly how Collective Management Organisations, or CMOs, feel.
Music plays in buses, shops, bars, churches, weddings, political rallies, radio stations, hotels, and festivals. Poems are recited, scripts are staged, and films are screened. Creativity is woven into daily life. Yet creative livelihoods remain fragile, with many artists living hand-to-mouth, ageing without security, and dying in poverty. This contradiction raises an unavoidable question: who really benefits from copyright in Zimbabwe artists, or the institutions meant to protect them?
CMOs exist for a legitimate and important reason. In modern economies, artists cannot realistically track every use of their work or negotiate licences with hundreds of users.
Collective management allows creators to bargain as a group, simplifies licensing for users, and enables international royalty collection through reciprocal agreements.
In countries where CMOs function well, they turn creativity into predictable income, shield artists from exploitation, and allow them to focus on producing work rather than policing its use. The problem in Zimbabwe is not the idea of collective management itself, but how it operates, whom it prioritises, and how accountable it is to the very people whose labour sustains it.
Zimbabwe’s cultural economy is vibrant and resilient. Music in particular is not a luxury; it is social infrastructure. It animates commerce, worship, celebration, protest, and everyday survival. Yet royalty distributions tell a far less inspiring story. Payouts are infrequent and often negligible, many artists receive nothing at all, and detailed usage reports are rare or unclear.
The gap between high cultural consumption and low artist income cannot be explained away by market size or artistic quality. It points instead to structural failure. When value is clearly being created but not reaching its source, the system designed to transmit that value deserves scrutiny.
At the centre of the problem is weak and inconsistent royalty collection. CMOs depend on licensing broadcasters, venues, event organisers, transport operators, and digital platforms. In Zimbabwe, enforcement is uneven and often negotiated rather than regulated. Some large users resist payment altogether, citing economic hardship, while the informal sector where music is heavily used remains largely unlicensed.
This results in a leaky system where creative work circulates freely but generates little return for its creators. Copyright law exists, but without consistent enforcement, it functions more as symbolism than as an economic tool.
Trust is the currency of collective management, and in Zimbabwe that currency is badly devalued. Artists repeatedly complain about the absence of publicly available audited financial statements, unclear royalty distribution formulas, and the lack of information showing who paid what, when, and for which works.
Without transparency, even competent systems lose legitimacy. Artists are no longer asking only how much they earned; they are asking how those figures were calculated. In governance terms, opacity invites suspicion. When information is withheld, confidence collapses, and institutions begin to operate on borrowed credibility.
Perhaps the most emotionally charged criticism of CMOs is the perception that institutions survive better than the artists they represent. Offices remain open, staff are paid, boards meet regularly, and operational structures persist. Meanwhile, many artists cannot afford medical care, veteran creatives rely on public donations in times of illness, and families of deceased artists are left destitute.
This imbalance erodes the moral authority of collective management. A copyright system that cannot protect ageing artists or provide basic social security fails its social contract. Copyright was never meant to enrich institutions while creators struggle to survive.
The global creative economy has shifted decisively toward digital platforms, data analytics, accurate metadata, and cross-border royalty tracking. Many Zimbabwean CMOs remain poorly equipped for this reality. They struggle to track streaming usage, capture diaspora audiences, and match works correctly to rights holders.
As a result, Zimbabwean creativity generates value internationally, but little of that value returns to artists at home. This is not a technological inevitability; it is a policy failure. In the digital era, neglecting data systems is equivalent to abandoning revenue.
Although CMOs are member-based organisations, many artists feel excluded from meaningful decision-making. Leadership structures often recycle the same figures, power is centralised, and feedback from members rarely reshapes policy. Low attendance at meetings is often misread as apathy, when in reality it reflects deep disillusionment.
When artists believe their voices do not matter, they disengage. Institutions then drift further from their founding purpose, becoming administrative bodies rather than representative ones.
Accusations that CMOs are “swindling” artists reflect anger and desperation more than legal conclusion. In most cases, there is no public proof of theft. What exists instead is evidence of systemic dysfunction: weak governance, poor systems, limited oversight, and inadequate regulation.
From a public policy perspective, intent matters less than outcome. If artists remain poor while their work is widely used, the system has failed, regardless of whether that failure was deliberate or accidental.
For most Zimbabwean creatives, royalties do not function as income security, pensions, or social protection. They are unpredictable supplements rather than reliable earnings. This undermines the very logic of copyright, which exists to convert creativity into sustainable livelihood.
When copyright cannot feed families or secure dignity in old age, its promise rings hollow.
Do we need CMOs at all?
Despite these failures, the answer is yes but not in their current form. Without CMOs, individual artists would negotiate from a position of extreme weakness, international royalties would vanish, and copyright would become effectively unenforceable.
The real question is not whether CMOs should exist, but whom they should serve and how they should be governed.
In countries where CMOs work, certain principles are consistent. Strong regulation compels transparency and accountability. Independent audits are used as tools for reform rather than as threats. Technology is treated as policy infrastructure, not a luxury. Most importantly, artists are placed at the centre of governance, not the margins.
If CMOs in Zimbabwe are to regain legitimacy, reform is unavoidable. Independent audits must be mandatory and accessible to members. Artists must be guaranteed meaningful representation in governance structures. Digital systems for tracking usage and distributing royalties must be prioritised. Royalty formulas must be simple, predictable, and understandable. The state must play its role as a regulator, ensuring both user compliance and institutional accountability.
These are not radical demands. They are the minimum requirements for a functioning creative economy.
Zimbabwe’s creative economy cannot grow while artists remain spectators in a system built on their labour. CMOs stand at a crossroads. They can reform and become genuine engines of creative empowerment, or they can resist change and drift into irrelevance.
Artists are not asking for charity. They are asking for fair systems, clear rules, and economic dignity.
If creativity is national wealth, then CMOs must stop behaving like tollgates and start acting like public institutions accountable to the people who generate that wealth.
nRaymond Millagre Langa is a Zimbabwean cultural thinker, writer, and creative advocate whose work interrogates power, heritage, and the political economy of art in contemporary Africa. He is the founder of Indebo Edutainment Trust and is known for combining sharp social analysis with storytelling and policy-oriented critique that centres artists’ dignity, memory, and survival.