Technological Transformation
A boom measured in plays
Measured by audience, African music is having its biggest decade so far. Spotify's 2025 Loud & Clear data show Nigerian artists generating 30.3 billion streams and 1.6 billion listening hours on the platform in 2025. First-time listeners discovered Nigerian artists more than 1.3 billion times, up 26% on 2024. Local artists held more than 80% of the places on Spotify Nigeria's Daily Top 50. South African artists, helped by global demand for amapiano, were discovered by new listeners more than 1.6 billion times, and nearly 3,550 of them appeared on Spotify editorial playlists. Spotify Wrapped 2025 reported that Afrobeats listeners grew 22% worldwide in a single year.
Revenue tells a smaller story. The IFPI Global Music Report 2026 puts recorded-music revenues for all of sub-Saharan Africa at US$120 million in 2025. That figure is 15.2% higher than the year before, which made the region joint second-fastest-growing in the world alongside the Middle East and North Africa. It is still less than 0.4% of the global total of US$31.7 billion. South Africa alone contributed 78.1% of the regional figure. For a continent of more than 1.4 billion people that produces some of the world's most-streamed music, the formal recorded-music market remains very small. The difference between audience size and revenue is mostly a technology and infrastructure problem: how people pay, how platforms bill, and how royalties get from a stream to a songwriter.
The per-stream arithmetic
Start with the platform economics. Spotify says it pays out about two-thirds of every dollar it earns from music to rights-holders. It distributes that money pro rata within each country: an artist with 1% of a country's streams receives 1% of the royalties generated there. Because the royalty pool is built from local subscription and advertising revenue, the value of a stream depends heavily on where the listener lives. Spotify Premium costs about ₦1,600 (US$1.17) a month in Nigeria, compared with about US$13.78 in Sweden.
The result is a sharp gap. Spotify reported that Nigerian artists generated more than ₦60 billion (about US$43.92 million) in royalties in 2025. TechCabal calculates that this works out to roughly ₦1.98 per stream, and to just 0.39% of the US$11 billion Spotify paid out worldwide. Estimates of the Nigerian payout per million streams vary widely, from about US$300 to about US$1,100, because Spotify does not publish country rates. Every source, however, places Nigeria near the bottom of the table. Independent estimates compiled by the Africa Global Forum put a UK stream at about US$0.0044, against roughly US$0.0011 for Nigeria and US$0.0014 for South Africa.
This is why export markets matter so much. South African artists generated more than R504 million (about US$30.7 million) on Spotify in 2025, up 28% year on year and nearly double the 2023 figure. Nearly 74% of that came from listeners outside South Africa. Afrobeats' fastest-growing markets, including Indonesia (+4,530% since 2020), India (+1,650%) and Brazil (+500%), are also among the lowest-paying. Reach is growing faster than revenue, and it is growing in markets where streams are worth the least.
Independents and the distribution layer
One encouraging development is that much of the money now goes to artists outside the major-label system. About 58% of the royalties earned by Nigerian artists on Spotify in 2025 went to independent artists or labels, and more than half of South African artists' royalties did as well. That is possible because of a growing set of digital distributors, aggregators and artist-services platforms that upload catalogues, split royalties and pay out. It is one of the less visible parts of Africa's creative-tech stack. A producer in Lagos or Durban can now reach global streaming services without a record contract. Whether they get paid on time and in full depends on accurate metadata, correct publishing registration and payout methods that work with local bank accounts and wallets.
Carrier billing: the African workaround
Inside Africa, card-based subscriptions remain a barrier. Few listeners have international debit cards, and data costs compete with every other household expense. The platforms built for African users have therefore relied on the telecom bill and the mobile wallet.
Boomplay, a joint venture between Transsion and NetEase, has come pre-installed on Transsion's Tecno, Itel and Infinix phones since 2015, which gave it reach that Western services could not match. Published estimates of its monthly users range from about 75 million to more than 90 million, but the company has not released audited user or revenue figures. Copenhagen-listed Mdundo.com has built its model on telecom partnerships with MTN, Vodacom, Airtel and Safaricom across Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, Ghana and South Africa, starting with Vodacom Tanzania in 2020. Its experience shows how hard the model is. Mdundo reported 41.8 million monthly active users in September 2025, then stopped reporting MAU and switched to counting paying subscription transactions: 9.9 million payments from 906,000 unique customers in the last quarter of 2025. Its half-year revenue nonetheless fell 25.5% to DKK4.4 million, with advertising revenue down 57.1%, and East African artists have reported lower payouts under renegotiated deals.
The conclusion is straightforward. Telecom billing solves the payment problem, and turns tens of millions of free listeners into hundreds of thousands of payers. Each payment, however, is small, often a daily or weekly bundle worth a few US cents, and the telco takes a share before the platform and rights-holders do. Africa's existing payment rails are good at small transactions, but the margins left for music are thin.
The collection gap: Kenya's warning
Streaming platforms pay recording royalties to labels and distributors. Songwriters and performers also depend on collective management organisations (CMOs) to license broadcasters, venues and digital services and to distribute the money they collect. This is where the system is weakest, and Kenya illustrates the problem.
In 2025 the Kenya Copyright Board (KECOBO) refused to renew the licence of the Music Copyright Society of Kenya (MCSK) for 2025/26, citing missing audited accounts for five years and a reported KSh56 million royalty shortfall. It licensed rival bodies PAVRISK and KAMP from 5 November 2025. The Copyright Tribunal barred MCSK from operating while its appeal is heard, and the High Court declined to suspend that ruling. A July 2024 High Court decision had already nullified Kenya's royalty tariffs for inadequate public participation, which left no approved tariffs under which any CMO could collect. As a result, one of Africa's most connected music markets has spent more than a year without a functioning legal mechanism for collecting much of its public-performance and broadcast revenue. No amount of streaming growth can make up for an institution that cannot collect and account for royalties.
IFPI's regional director for sub-Saharan Africa, Angela Ndambuki, has highlighted a second, newer threat: streaming fraud and AI-generated content. Bots that inflate play counts dilute a pro-rata royalty pool for every legitimate artist in it. Most of the platforms are global, but the CMOs and copyright regulators that have to respond are national, and many are underfunded.
What would close the gap
Africa's music-tech stack needs work at four levels:
Conclusion
Africa's music industry no longer has an audience problem. Its problem is converting that audience into income. The 15.2% growth in 2025 and the rising Spotify payouts in Lagos and Johannesburg show progress. They also show how concentrated the money is: in one country (South Africa), in listeners abroad, and in a few platforms. Afrobeats and amapiano have shown that African creativity can reach global audiences. The next stage requires the less visible infrastructure of payments, data, collective management and fraud detection, so that more of the earnings stay with the artists who generate them.
