Indonesia has removed the state fee for recording songs and musical works on its copyright register, cutting the tariff from Rp200,000 to Rp0 on August 1. The change is small enough to fit on a price list, but it is aimed at one of the hardest problems in music royalties: identifying a work, its owners and its performers well enough to pay the correct people when that work is used.
The policy’s immediate effect is clear. Filing is now free for songs and music, while other categories of creative work retain their existing tariffs, according to independent reporting on Government Regulation No. 30 of 2026. Its larger promise is conditional. More filings could strengthen Indonesia’s Pusat Data Lagu dan/atau Musik, or PDLM, but a fuller register will improve royalty payments only if ownership records are validated, connected to collective-management data and matched against reliable reports of actual music use.
A targeted change, not a new copyright system
The official legal record for Government Regulation No. 30 of 2026 lists July 2 as the regulation’s date of establishment and identifies it as the new schedule for non-tax state revenue at the Ministry of Law. The song-and-music waiver took effect on August 1. Law Minister Supratman Andi Agtas publicly confirmed the zero tariff in Jakarta on July 24, as documented by Indonesia’s ANTARA news agency.
The wording matters. Indonesia is making pencatatan—administrative recordal—free. It is not making copyright itself newly available, nor turning payment of a fee into the source of a creator’s rights. Under Indonesia’s Copyright Law, copyright arises automatically under a declarative principle once a work has been embodied in tangible form; the government’s explanation of the registration framework states that principle directly. A record can still be valuable evidence and an important data input, but it should not be confused with the act that creates copyright.
The chronology shows that the fee waiver is part of a broader data project. In March, the Directorate General of Intellectual Property, or DJKI, said it was improving PDLM and considering bundled recording fees so more musicians would submit works and make the database’s metadata more complete. It also described PDLM as a future basis for more immediate royalty collection from music users. That March policy statement preceded the more decisive move from discounted filing to no filing charge.
DJKI has attached striking numbers to the problem. The agency estimates that Indonesia has roughly seven million songs and musical works, while only about 26,000 were then recorded in PDLM, according to MerahPutih’s report on the new tariff. Those figures illustrate the scale of the agency’s stated ambition, but they are agency estimates rather than an independently audited census. They also may not describe like-for-like datasets: a national estimate of works and an operational database count can differ in scope, duplication rules and treatment of versions.
Royalty data has two sides
A repertoire database answers one set of questions: What is the song? Who wrote it? Who owns each share? Which performers and phonogram producers hold related rights? Royalty distribution requires a second set: Where was the song used, how often, in which category and under what licence?
Indonesia’s National Collective Management Organization, LMKN, made that second side explicit in April when it adopted a 2026 distribution policy based on the availability and quality of usage data. Under the LMKN framework, users that provide song logs support direct, usage-based allocation. Where logs are absent, LMKN instead relies on sampling, proxies and an Unlogged Performance Allocation, or UPA.
The system began moving gradually toward data-based distribution in June. LMKN said that 20 percent of royalties collected from music users that did not submit usage reports would be assigned to UPA. It also warned collective-management organizations to keep member data accurate and current because those records directly affect calculations and distribution. The UPA announcement therefore reveals both the direction of travel and the present limitation: Indonesia wants payments tied to verified use, but it still needs an alternative pool where the usage trail is incomplete.
That is why free recordal can help without being sufficient. If a valid new PDLM entry supplies a missing creator name or ownership share, it may make an otherwise unidentified use matchable. It cannot reconstruct a venue’s missing set list, establish how often a song was played or automatically resolve competing claims to the same share. Nor does a PDLM entry by itself complete the membership and verification process through which LMKN says royalties are distributed via collective-management organizations.
The distinction is visible in Indonesia’s unclaimed royalties. In March, LMKN disclosed Rp33.021 billion in unclaimed funds associated with about 500,906 works identified as used in Indonesia. Its breakdown included Rp19.159 billion for digital uses attributed to non-members and Rp5.555 billion for digital uses whose creators were unknown, alongside live-event and related-rights categories. Those are LMKN’s own disclosed figures, not an independent audit, but they show that “unclaimed” is not one metadata error. It can mean a known work attached to somebody outside the distribution network, an unknown claimant, or a use that cannot yet be reconciled with the available rights data.
By April, more than 100 people had applied to claim from the pool and their submissions were still being verified. LMKN said the money reflected nearly two million reported uses and estimated that 30,000 to 300,000 domestic and foreign rightsholders could be involved. The unusually wide range in LMKN’s claimant update is itself a measure of uncertainty, not a precise count.
What success would look like
Inference, not a measured outcome: removing Rp200,000 from the filing decision should make recordal easier for independent creators and small producers, especially when submissions can be made through DJKI’s electronic process. The likely gain is a larger intake of ownership information. Whether that intake becomes trustworthy royalty metadata depends on validation, duplicate detection, share reconciliation and synchronization among PDLM, LMKN and the country’s collective-management organizations.
There is an important near-term uncertainty. As of August 10, no verified post-launch figure reviewed for this article showed how many additional songs had been recorded since the tariff reached zero. There is therefore no evidence yet that the waiver has increased filing volume, improved match rates or reduced the unclaimed pool. Those are outcomes to test over subsequent distribution periods, not benefits that can already be declared.
The most useful public measures would go beyond a raw filing counter: the number of distinct works with validated creator and rightsholder shares; the proportion of usage logs matched without manual intervention; the share of commercial users submitting complete logs; the time required to correct disputed records; and the value and age of royalties that remain unclaimed. Reporting those measures consistently would make it possible to separate database growth from database quality.
The waiver also should not be conflated with Indonesia’s wider copyright rewrite. A separate draft bill addresses artificial intelligence, online platforms and other unresolved questions; Reuters reported in July that its passage timetable was unclear. Government Regulation No. 30 is narrower and already operative: it changes a Ministry of Law service tariff for songs and music.
For creators, the practical signal is to document works, rights and splits early, then keep collective-management records aligned with the national entry. For venues, broadcasters and digital services, free creator filing does not lessen the need to submit accurate usage information. For PDLM, LMKN and the collective societies, the accountability test is whether those two streams of data meet.
Indonesia has removed one gate at the front of the royalty pipeline. That is a concrete improvement in access. The harder work begins after “Rp0”: proving that more records can become cleaner matches, and that cleaner matches can become money in the right account.