Every time a song plays in a São Paulo shopping center, streams on a phone in Manchester or turns up in the background of a television drama, someone is owed money. The question of who collects it, and how it finds its way back to the people who wrote the music, is answered by a global network of collective management organizations that most listeners never think about. Two of the most important sit on opposite sides of the Atlantic. In Brazil, Abramus has grown into the country’s largest rights society by membership. In the United Kingdom, the Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society, known throughout the industry as MCPS, has spent more than a century making sure songwriters and publishers are paid whenever their compositions are reproduced. For anyone who owns, licenses or administers music internationally, understanding how these two organizations work is no longer optional.

They are, in many ways, a study in contrast. Abramus is broad and multidisciplinary, operating inside a centralized Brazilian system that pools public performance income through a single national office. MCPS is a specialist, focused on mechanical and synchronization rights in a British market that divides responsibility among several distinct societies. Yet both are wrestling with the same forces that are reshaping music publishing worldwide: the dominance of streaming, the rise of multi-territory licensing and the arrival of artificial intelligence platforms that consume and generate music at extraordinary scale. How each society responds will shape what creators in two of the world’s most vibrant music markets actually take home.

Abramus and the Brazilian Model

The Associação Brasileira de Música e Artes was founded on May 13, 1982, and over four decades it has become the largest nonprofit collective copyright management organization in Brazil. Today it represents more than 70,000 creators and rights holders, a roster that spans composers, lyricists, performers, musicians, publishers and record producers. The society describes itself as the leading Brazilian association by number of members, and its share of the domestic market has hovered around 30 percent in recent years, a remarkable position in a country with one of the most active and diverse music cultures on earth. Its operations are anchored in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, with regional units that have extended its reach into the Northeast and other parts of the country where local genres generate enormous public performance income.

What sets Abramus apart from many of its international peers is its scope. It does not limit itself to music. Through its affiliated organization AUTVIS, it manages rights for visual artists, and it also represents playwrights, choreographers and producers in theater and dance, licensing stage productions that draw on the works of its members. That breadth reflects a distinctly Brazilian view of creative rights as a shared ecosystem rather than a series of separate silos, and it allows a single organization to serve artists whose careers cross disciplines.

On the music side, Abramus collects and distributes public performance royalties and handles reproduction rights for its members, but it does not operate alone. Brazil channels public performance collection through Ecad, the Escritório Central de Arrecadação e Distribuição, a private nonprofit central office administered jointly by seven music associations: Abramus, Amar, Assim, Sbacem, Sicam, Socinpro and UBC. Ecad licenses radio, television, live events, businesses and digital services across the country and then passes income to the associations, which in turn pay their members. A songwriter in Brazil cannot receive performance royalties without belonging to one of those seven societies, which is why membership in an organization like Abramus is the first and most essential step for any creator who wants to be paid.

The scale of that system has grown dramatically. Ecad reported collecting about R$2.1 billion in 2025, an increase of roughly 15 percent over the prior year, and distributing about R$1.7 billion to rights holders. Digital services now account for a substantial and rising share of that income, a shift that has pushed Brazilian societies to invest heavily in data matching, online registration and member tools. Abramus has been at the forefront of that effort, offering online membership and work registration and building a dedicated digital operation to manage streaming income. For international publishers and administrators, those investments matter, because the accuracy of a Brazilian society’s data directly determines how much foreign repertoire gets identified and paid.

That international dimension is central to the Abramus story. Through reciprocal and representation agreements with societies around the world, it tracks and distributes royalties earned by its members abroad and collects for foreign repertoire performed in Brazil. Its network of agreements has extended its reach to members across more than 190 territories, and it participates in the global working groups that set standards for how societies exchange data and money. For a catalog owner outside Brazil, a well-connected partner like Abramus can mean the difference between royalties that arrive and royalties that quietly disappear.

MCPS and the Business of Mechanical Rights

The Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society takes a narrower but deeper approach. Founded in 1924 and now owned by the Music Publishers Association as part of the MPA Group, MCPS exists to collect and pay mechanical royalties to composers, songwriters, lyricists and music publishers. A mechanical royalty is owed whenever a musical composition is copied or reproduced, which once meant pressing vinyl records and manufacturing compact discs and now encompasses digital downloads, on-demand streams, broadcast recordings and the countless reproductions that take place inside modern media production.

MCPS also licenses the synchronization of compositions into television programs, films, advertising and other audiovisual works, the core business of music supervision. Through MCPS Production Music, it manages rights for production music libraries, licensing the vast catalogs of commissioned tracks that broadcasters and producers rely on every day. Unlike many performing rights organizations, which typically distribute quarterly, MCPS pays its members monthly, a cadence that makes a real difference to the cash flow of independent publishers and working writers.

The society’s growth over the past decade has been striking. Its annual distributions rose from £140.1 million in 2015 to £219.9 million in 2025, while its membership roughly doubled from about 23,000 to 47,000 over the same period. Since the turn of the century, MCPS has distributed close to £5 billion in mechanical royalties. Those numbers reflect both the expansion of streaming in the United Kingdom and the society’s success in recruiting a new generation of independent writers and publishers who once might have relied entirely on larger administrators.

A New Operating Model for 2027

MCPS is now in the middle of the most significant change to its structure in decades. In September 2026, at its annual rightsholder meeting in London, the society unveiled an enhanced operating model that will take effect in early 2027 and give MCPS a more direct role in major licensing negotiations. The centerpiece is a direct agreement with ICE Services, the digital licensing hub established by PRS for Music, Germany’s GEMA and Sweden’s STIM. Under the new arrangement, ICE will handle multi-territory online licensing for MCPS repertoire across streaming services, downloads and AI platforms, a recognition that the next generation of licensing deals will involve companies that train and deploy generative music technology.

The plan extends well beyond digital. MCPS will partner with the Irish Music Rights Organisation on international licensing and collections, including a review of its reciprocal agreements with societies abroad. It will work with the Swedish platform MAIA Universe to offer automated synchronization licensing for advertising, film and video games, beginning with a pilot in early 2027 and a wider rollout later in the year. Participation will remain optional, and MCPS will continue to offer direct sync licensing for repertoire that is not placed on the platform. The society will also take direct control of rate card licensing for production music used in television, film and advertising through a new portal. MCPS chief executive Paul Clements has framed the overhaul as a response to a market that is evolving quickly and creating new opportunities for members, supported by an expanded internal team focused on faster query handling and stronger reporting.

None of this means a break with PRS for Music, the partner MCPS has worked alongside for roughly 30 years. PRS will remain a core strategic ally, continuing to provide member services, royalty distributions, usage processing, invoicing and collections, and handling day-to-day registrations and queries. The two organizations will jointly negotiate the major licenses that combine mechanical and performance rights, including broadcast, general online, UK digital and gaming deals. The result is a hybrid model in which MCPS gains more strategic control while keeping the operational backbone its members already know.

How the Two Systems Compare

Placed side by side, Abramus and MCPS illustrate two fundamentally different philosophies of collective management. Abramus is a generalist operating within a centralized national structure. It represents music alongside theater, dance and the visual arts, and its public performance income flows through Ecad’s single collection channel before reaching its members. MCPS is a specialist operating within a divided market. In the United Kingdom, public performance and broadcast rights in compositions are handled by PRS for Music, while performance rights in sound recordings belong to PPL, which pays performers and record labels. MCPS concentrates on the reproduction of compositions and the synchronization licensing that goes with it.

Neither model is inherently superior. Brazil’s centralized approach gives music users a single point of contact and has helped Ecad build one of the most respected distribution operations in Latin America. The British approach allows each society to specialize and has fostered sophisticated partnerships, as the new MCPS model demonstrates. For rights holders, the practical lesson is the same in both countries. Royalties depend on accurate registration, clean metadata and the right society relationships, and a catalog that is properly documented in one territory can still go unpaid in another if those foundations are missing.

Why It Matters to Songwriters and Catalog Owners

For songwriters, publishers and the companies that administer their work, Brazil and the United Kingdom are two of the most valuable territories in the world. Brazil is among the largest and fastest growing music markets in Latin America, with a domestic culture that produces global hits and an audience that streams at enormous volume. The United Kingdom remains one of the great exporters of music and one of its most important licensing hubs, home to a sync and production music economy that feeds film, television and advertising worldwide. Revenue left uncollected in either market represents real money lost, and as streaming and AI multiply the number of uses each composition generates, the stakes grow every year.

That is why the work of organizations like Abramus and MCPS deserves more attention than it typically receives. Their investments in data, technology and international partnerships determine whether a royalty earned in Fortaleza or Glasgow ever reaches the person who wrote the song. As both societies adapt to a market defined by digital scale and artificial intelligence, the creators they serve stand to benefit from faster payments, broader licensing and stronger protection, provided their works are registered, their ownership is documented and their representatives are paying close attention.

At Sunset Music, we follow these developments because they shape every license we negotiate and every catalog we help administer. Collective management is not glamorous, but it is the infrastructure on which every musical career ultimately rests. The more clearly creators understand how it works, from Ecad’s central office in Brazil to the new MCPS partnerships taking shape in London, the better positioned they will be to collect what their music has earned.