If you release music from outside the United States and no W-8BEN is on file for you, the statutory rate of 30% is withheld from your US-sourced royalties before anyone pays you anything. That is a tax authority's deduction, taken at source, and it happens regardless of who distributes your music. A valid W-8BEN can reduce it to the rate your country's treaty with the United States allows — and for a number of countries, including several in the Gulf and North Africa, there is no treaty, so 30% stands with no relief available.
This article is general information, not tax advice. Mazufa is not a tax adviser. Your own accountant, or your country's tax authority, is the correct authority on your specific situation.
Where the 30% comes from
The withholding applies to US-sourced royalties — money generated by use of your recordings inside the United States. The paying side of that chain is required to withhold before remitting. When no valid W-8BEN is on file, the rate applied is the statutory 30%, because without the form there is no documented basis for treating you as anything other than an undocumented foreign payee.
Two things follow from that, and both matter:
- The deduction is not discretionary. Nobody in the chain is choosing to take it.
- It is triggered by the absence of a document. The default is not neutral. It is the maximum.
That second point is the whole reason this form is worth twenty minutes of your evening.
What the W-8BEN actually does
The W-8BEN is a certificate. It does two things and only two things.
It certifies that you are not a US person. That alone is what stops the payer from applying US backup-withholding rules meant for domestic payees.
It claims a treaty rate, if your country has a treaty. This is the part that changes the number. The form asks you to identify your country of residence for tax purposes and to state the treaty article and rate you are claiming under. If your country has an income tax treaty with the United States that covers copyright royalties, the treaty rate replaces the statutory 30%.
What the form does not do is equally worth stating plainly. It does not create a treaty where none exists. It does not make you exempt from tax in your own country. It does not recover withholding already taken on past payments. And it is not a Mazufa document — it is a US tax form, and the same form applies wherever you distribute.
The treaty rates our fact sheet records
These are copyright-royalty rates, taken from IRS Tax Treaty Table 1 (Rev. May 2023) as recorded in our verified fact sheet. Treaty tables are revised; check the current table before you rely on a figure.
| Country of residence | Copyright-royalty rate |
|---|---|
| Pakistan | 0% |
| Morocco | 10% |
| Turkey | 10% |
| Indonesia | 10% |
| Egypt | 15% |
| Tunisia | 15% |
| India | 15% |
Two notes on reading that table. First, 0% is not a rounding of "low" — Pakistan's recorded copyright-royalty rate is zero, which means a correctly completed W-8BEN removes the deduction entirely rather than shrinking it. Second, these are the rates for copyright royalties specifically. Treaties often set different rates for different classes of royalty, and the article number you cite on the form has to be the one that covers your income. Getting the country right and the article wrong does not help you.
The countries where there is nothing to claim
This is the part that gets softened elsewhere, and it should not be. Our fact sheet records the following as having no treaty with the United States: Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Lebanon, Algeria and Brazil. For a tax resident of any of those, the statutory 30% applies and there is no treaty relief to claim.
You should still file the W-8BEN. Certifying your foreign status is separate from claiming a treaty benefit, and the certification is what keeps you out of the rules written for US payees. But nobody should tell you the form will lower your rate when it will not. If you are in Dubai or Riyadh or Beirut and someone's help page implies a form will fix your 30%, that page is selling you something.
If you hold tax residence in more than one place, the country you put on the form is the country you are actually resident in for tax purposes — not the country of your passport, and not the country you would prefer. That determination has consequences beyond this form, which is exactly the kind of question to put to an accountant.
Line 6 takes your own country's tax number, not a US one
The single most common reason artists outside the US abandon this form is the belief that they first need a US Individual Taxpayer Identification Number — an ITIN — which involves a separate application, certified identity documents, and a wait.
For most people, that is not required. W-8BEN line 6 accepts a foreign tax identification number: the tax number issued to you by your own country. Most artists do not need a US ITIN to file the form and claim a treaty rate.
Practically, that means the blocker is usually smaller than it looks. If your country issues you a tax number, you have what line 6 wants. If your country does not issue tax numbers to individuals at all, that is a real edge case and worth asking your accountant about rather than guessing on a form.
How long the form stays valid
A W-8BEN is valid through the last day of the third succeeding calendar year after it is signed. A form signed at any point during one year covers the remainder of that year plus the three years after it, and then expires.
Two habits follow from that:
- Put the expiry in your calendar the day you sign, not the year it lapses. An expired W-8BEN reverts you to 30% silently — there is no warning, only a smaller payment.
- File a new form when your circumstances change, without waiting for expiry. A change of country of residence invalidates the certification, because the certification is a statement about where you are resident.
Withholding is not a commission, and Mazufa's is 0%
Some services present the deducted amount as a line item in a way that blurs it into their own cut. It is worth separating the two cleanly.
Mazufa's commission is 0%. We take no commission and no percentage of your royalties. Royalties received for a release are passed through in full.
US withholding is a tax authority's deduction, taken before the money reaches us or you. So is a bank or payment provider's own transfer fee. These are third-party costs outside our control, and they are not a Mazufa deduction. We will not promise that the number arriving in your bank account equals the number a streaming service generated — that promise is not ours to make, and anyone who makes it is describing a world where tax authorities and banks do not exist. What we will promise is the part we control: our share is zero.
That distinction is the honest version of "keep 100%". Keeping 100% of what we handle is real. Keeping 100% of what leaves the United States is not something any distributor can offer you.
What to do this week
- Find out your country of tax residence and whether it appears in the treaty list above, in the no-treaty list, or in neither. If it is in neither, the current IRS treaty table is the thing to check — not a forum post.
- Get your own country's tax identification number ready for line 6. Assume you do not need a US ITIN until someone with a professional obligation to you says otherwise.
- Complete a W-8BEN and keep a dated copy, with the expiry — the last day of the third succeeding calendar year — written on it.
- If your residence is in a no-treaty country, budget for the full 30% on the US-sourced portion of your income and stop looking for a workaround. There isn't one on this form.
- Take anything with real money attached to an accountant in your own jurisdiction. This article tells you what the form does. It cannot tell you what you owe.
Mazufa's tools are free and run entirely in your browser, and every application is reviewed by a person. None of that changes your tax position, and we are not going to pretend it does.
Sources
- IRS Tax Treaty Table 1, Rev. May 2023 — statutory 30% rate, the copyright-royalty treaty rates listed above, the no-treaty countries listed above, the line 6 foreign-TIN provision, and the validity period. Recorded as verified in the Mazufa fact sheet; no URL is recorded there for this source, so none is reproduced here rather than guessed at.
- Mazufa commercial fact sheet (internal, entry dated 2026-09-08) — 0% commission; third-party costs such as bank transfer fees and statutory withholding are not a Mazufa deduction.