Engineering How Music Gets Paid In MENA – Exclusive Interview With Ghali Bouzoubaa

Ghali Bouzoubaa is Senior Operations Manager at Sony Music Publishing, where he leads the regional team responsible for rights administration, royalty operations, and the cross‑border infrastructure that connects creators across the Middle East and North Africa to the global music rights economy. A multilingual operator with deep cultural literacy across the Maghreb, the Gulf, and the Levant, he has spent nearly eight years working at the intersection of music, data, and rights infrastructure, building a reputation as one of the region’s most clear‑eyed voices on how value moves through the modern music business.

In this interview, he unpacks what is genuinely different about operating in MENA, why metadata and registration discipline have become two of the most strategic investments any modern songwriter can make, and what it will take for the music of this region to participate in the global rights economy on the terms its reach deserves.

Ghali Bouzoubaa, Senior Manager, Operations | Music Business

You work on the systems behind how music gets paid. What does that actually look like day to day in MENA?

Operating in MENA sits at an intersection that rarely exists elsewhere, a region producing music with global reach, an infrastructure only starting to be built, and a creative ecosystem as multilingual and multilayered as the region itself. Across MENA, we work in Arabic, French, and English, but Arabic itself fragments into as many dialects as countries, each effectively its own creative language. For example, in North Africa, Amazigh itself carries an entire culture and identity. Music here is rarely just music, it carries national, regional, and sometimes diaspora identity in the work.

That defines my role in two ways. Music business education across the entire ecosystem (artists, songwriters, producers, lawyers, brand executives, industry professionals) is one of its most strategic functions, those who fully grasp how the global publishing framework works number in the hundreds today, and the work has to be approached with respect for how business is done here, where trust often carries more weight between people than any contract. Equally vital is the forensic side, reconstructing metadata for catalogs that hold decades of artistic legacy. Part operations, part educator, part archivist, part diplomat. That is what makes operating here uniquely demanding and uniquely worth doing.

Where do you see the biggest breakdown today between a song being created and a songwriter actually getting paid?

The point in the system that determines almost everything else sits right at the start, at the moment a work enters the global rights system, and it rarely gets the attention it deserves. International identifiers exist precisely to make this layer reliable, including the IPI number used in roughly 120 countries to identify a writer, and the ISWC, which uniquely identifies a composition. When those are missing or inconsistent, every subsequent royalty calculation depends on data that has to be corrected later rather than captured properly the first time.

This is where the asymmetry of the system shows up most clearly. A brilliantly written, brilliantly produced song can under‑earn relative to its potential simply because its registration was imperfect, while a less successful song that was registered cleanly will collect everything it is owed. Closing that gap, between what creators expect and what the system actually requires at the entry point, is one of the most important conversations in the industry today. The appetite to close it is real, and the work is well underway.

How does inconsistent metadata across territories translate into real financial outcomes for artists?

Metadata is, in many ways, the language the global rights system uses to recognize who you are and what you wrote. When that language is consistent across territories, the system works beautifully and the money flows where it should, on time. When it is inconsistent, matching takes longer, in some cases substantially so. Royalty calculations get held in suspense, statements have to be reconciled across multiple formats, and the timeline from creation to payment stretches significantly.

For an established creator with strong publishing infrastructure behind them, those delays are usually caught and corrected before they become real money problems. For an independent songwriter without that infrastructure, a misspelled identifier or an inconsistent work code can translate into income that takes years to reach them in full, ongoing administrative burden to chase corrections across multiple territories, and uncertainty about what they should actually be earning. This is why one of the most important conversations in modern music administration today is about data quality, identifiers, and the everyday discipline of getting the registration layer right. The trajectory across the industry is genuinely encouraging.

What makes the MENA region particularly distinctive when it comes to publishing infrastructure compared to more mature markets?

The infrastructure is genuinely harder to operate in than in mature markets, and every stakeholder, internal and external, is clear‑eyed about that. But that is also the beauty of this region right now. The energy directed toward development is intensely exponential, and with critical layers of the system still untapped, the impact of well‑designed work is tangible within days, weeks, or months rather than years. There is everything to do here, and an enormous amount is already being done. That combination is rare, and it makes this one of the most exciting regions in the music business to work in today.

Layer onto that the reality that much of the regional industry was built on relationship‑driven arrangements rooted in trust and personal honor, values that still anchor business here today but predate today’s digital documentation. We are formalizing an entire generation of culturally important catalogs in parallel with their ongoing commercial life. Inside global systems built primarily around Latin script, a single Arabic‑language song can carry multiple title spellings and name variants across databases. The catch‑up curve will not be linear. It will be exponential.

If you had to fix one part of the system tomorrow, where would you start and why?

Registration is the foundation layer of the entire music rights economy. What I would change first is what happens in the first ten minutes after a song is finished. Right now, that moment is mostly left to chance. The writers go home, the producer saves the file, and no one writes down who actually gets paid for the next several decades. The data captured at registration flows into every downstream calculation, in every territory, for the entire commercial life of the work. That is why this is where I would start. 

Imagine instead that every songwriter, anywhere, had a simple way to capture splits, identifiers, and credits at the moment the song is finished. The rest of the system, even with all its complexity, would suddenly have something honest to work with. That is the intervention that excites me, not redesigning the global rights economy, but making the entry into it work for the people who actually write the music. Everything else flows from there.

Practically, that means treating registration with the same rigor and infrastructure we apply to financial reporting. Standardized international formats from day one. Verified writer and publisher identifiers, valid international work codes, signed split sheets, and a clear publisher of record. A single source of truth that propagates cleanly across the global network. It is also the highest‑leverage intervention available anywhere in the system. A correction made at registration takes minutes. The same correction made years later, after revenue has already moved across multiple jurisdictions, can take quarters of recovery work and may never fully restore what was lost.

What should independent artists or small labels in the region be doing differently right now to protect their long‑term income?

My advice is the same I would give a founder running any small business in a complex regulatory environment, take your own infrastructure seriously from day one. Document every split, in writing, signed by every contributor, on the day the song is finished. In a culture where trust between collaborators is often the contract, asking for signatures can feel awkward. But the absence of that document, five years on, is one of the most painful conversations in this industry, and one I have had too many times.

Beyond that, treat your identifiers with the seriousness of a tax registration. Make sure every writer carries the correct international identifier and every work the correct international code. Get an IPI number through your preferred society, ensure every work carries its ISWC, and treat your metadata with the seriousness of a tax registration. Artists and small labels who treat administration as a strategic function are the ones who, ten years on, own durable, compounding income streams. That is the long game, and it is winnable.

You moved from artist‑facing roles into operations. What changed your perspective on where real impact happens?

In an earlier chapter, I worked closely with artists and labels across North Africa. The patterns were impossible to miss, different names, different countries, often the same root causes. Over time, something simple became clear. The most valuable thing I could do for a creator was not to sit across from them explaining why a royalty had not arrived. It was to make sure the next creator never had to have that conversation in the first place.

That is what pulled me into operations. The work is quieter, but it compounds. One careful registration today protects an entire catalog for decades. One well-designed process spares thousands of creators a phone call they should never have needed. This is the work that respects the music most, not speaking for an artist after the fact, but building the conditions in which the value of a song reaches the person who wrote it, without anyone having to chase it.

You often frame music as a system to be engineered. What does that mindset unlock that the industry typically overlooks?

The mindset unlocks something the industry rarely names directly, that operational rigor is how reverence for the music actually scales. Without it, our care for the work stays anecdotal, present where someone happens to be paying attention, absent where they aren't. With it, every song, every writer, every territory gets the same standard of attention, every time.

The art deserves emotional investment, protection, advocacy, even reverence. The administration around the art deserves the same rigor an engineer would bring to anything else worth getting right. When you see music rights as data, royalty flows as logic, and contracts as the rules connecting them, you stop scaling teams to manage friction and start designing the friction out, so the people who make the music can spend their time on the music.

Looking ahead, what needs to change for the music of this region to fully participate in the global rights economy?

This question deserves more ambition than it usually receives. Music from this region is not a peripheral category waiting for permission to participate in the global economy. It is one of the world’s great living musical traditions, with audiences that already span continents, and its commercial value is meaningfully under‑realized today because the infrastructure around it has not yet caught up to its reach.

What needs to change is threefold. The regional rights infrastructure has to keep maturing, and the pace has to accelerate. The next generation of writers, producers, and small publishers has to develop the same fluency in the music business they already bring to their craft. And the global system has to keep getting better at recognizing the works of this region on fully equal terms, in their full linguistic and cultural diversity. The talent is here. The audience is here. What remains is to build the rights economy that lets the value flow back to the people creating it. That work is among the most consequential projects on the local industry’s desk today, and the next chapter will, I believe, be written from this region. Helping to write it is why I do what I do.

Follow me on Instagram and LinkedIn for more info!

Read more from Ghali Bouzoubaa