THE Southern African Music Rights Organisation (Samro) has revealed that it’s paid a whopping R22 million to musicians who only recently updated their banking details.
The organisation’s CEO, Annabel Lebethe, told Daily Sun they had R33 million that was unclaimed.
She said they’ve paid about 32% of musicians and are still looking for the 68%.
“We have been able to pay more than 1 200 members who have updated their bank accounts since the inception of the project. And so far, we’ve distributed R22 million to members who had unclaimed royalties due to outdated banking details, which amounted to R33 million,” Annabel said.
The organisation has embarked on a large-scale process to contact thousands of members who still need to claim.
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“We have shared bulk communication with our members providing the list of members with unclaimed royalties. The initiative allowed the members to further inform their fellow creators that formed part of this initiative. The track and trace initiative leveraged us internal database to identify and contact specific members with outdated banking information," said Annabel.
“We strongly encourage all members to regularly update their banking details and to closely monitor the Unclaimed Royalties platform on our website to check if they have accrued royalties due to them."
When asked who qualifies to get the money, Annabel said: “The unclaimed royalties process is for full members who have earned royalties for any Samro distributions, exceeding a threshold of R100, but could not receive their payouts due to outdated banking information.”
“To make it easy and seamless for our members, in November 2022 we introduced the Unclaimed Royalties online platform which enables our members to verify if they have any accumulated royalties due to outdated banking information."
