How Ecad works, in plain English

Ecad, the Central Office for Collection and Distribution (Escritório Central de Arrecadação e Distribuição), is the body that collects public performance royalties in Brazil. Radio, TV, streaming, concerts, bars, gyms, parties: wherever music plays to an audience, there is collection.

It is not a government agency, nor is it a songwriters’ society. It is an office run by seven collective management societies, namely Abramus, UBC, Sicam, Socinpro, Amar, Assim and Sbacem, that centralizes collection and handles distribution.

How the money travels

• Ecad charges whoever plays music in public.
• It receives from those users the information on what played, when and how much.
• It matches those performances against the database of filed works.
• It distributes to the societies, which pay the rights holders.

In 2025, R$ 2.1 billion was collected and R$ 1.7 billion distributed to more than 345 thousand rights holders, an average of about R$ 4.6 thousand per rights holder for the year. The average is misleading: distribution is heavily concentrated, and the long tail receives very little.

Why it takes so long

Months go by between your song playing and the money landing in your account. It isn’t bad will: it is the time it takes to gather what played from thousands of users, match it against the database, identify rights holders and close the distribution period.

This means there are two different clocks in your life as a songwriter. The fee an artist pays to record your song arrives in days. The performance royalty arrives months later. Anyone who doesn’t understand that difference thinks they are being cheated.

Where your song loses money

Performances are matched to works by data. When the data is wrong or missing, the performance doesn’t find the work:

• The work isn’t filed, or is filed without an ISWC.
• The rights holder’s name differs between the filing and what was reported.
• The split doesn’t add up to 100%, or a rights holder has no ID on file.
• The master recording has no ISRC or has incomplete metadata.

With digital already at 33.6% of collections and growing, this gets worse: distribution is increasingly driven by data, and a work with poor metadata loses proportionally more than it did in the radio era.

How Yawh handles it

As a licensed publisher, we file the work with the correct metadata from the start, with a signed split and rights holders identified by official ID. When the money arrives, you see the statement by work and by period: gross amount received, publishing share deducted and net amount. Line by line.