Africa's streaming is growing faster than its royalty collection

Sub-Saharan Africa had another strong year. IFPI's Global Music Report 2026 says the region's recorded music revenues grew 15.2% in 2025 to $120 million, level with the Middle East and North Africa and behind only Latin America's 17.1%. At IFPI's performance rights conference in Lagos at the end of March, Nigeria's culture minister Hannatu Musawa said digital revenues in the region rose by more than 20%.

That is the headline. The rest of the data tells a less comfortable story: the money arriving through streaming is growing faster than the systems that are supposed to license, collect and pay it out.

Where is the money actually going?

Mostly to one country. IFPI says South Africa accounted for 78.1% of Sub-Saharan Africa's recorded revenues in 2025, after growing 12.9%. Do the arithmetic and every other market in the region, Nigeria and Kenya included, shared roughly $26 million between them. That is our calculation from IFPI's two figures, not a number IFPI published, but it puts the Afrobeats export story in proportion. The music travels. Much of the money it earns at home does not yet show up in the industry's own revenue tables.

It also explains why the growth rate is so high. A 15.2% rise on a $120 million base is small change in a global market that IFPI puts at $31.7 billion. On those numbers the whole region is well under half a percent of world recorded revenue.

Why is collection falling behind?

Recorded revenue is only one side. Songwriters and publishers are paid through collecting societies, and CISAC's Global Collections Report 2025 puts Africa's 2024 collections at €90 million, up 14.2% and led by broadcast and live performance. Worldwide, CISAC members collected a record €13.97 billion. Africa was the smallest of the five regions it lists, at well under 1% of the total. CISAC's figures run a year behind IFPI's and cover different rights, so the comparison is rough, but 14.2% growth in collections sits below the more than 20% growth in digital recorded income.

The Lagos conference was largely about that gap. IFPI's chief legal officer Lauri Rechardt told delegates that collecting societies have a duty to "effectively and efficiently license broadcasters and public performance users", according to Music In Africa. Licensing companies committed to review broadcast agreements and build longer-term strategies for performance income. Africa Briefing describes performance rights licensing as the weakest link in the chain, with broadcasters, venues and event organisers often operating without full licences and enforcement varying from country to country. Musawa's own summary was blunter: the gap between cultural influence and economic return is "the defining challenge".

Streaming money is easier to count than radio or nightclub money, because every play is logged. That is why digital grows fastest. The harder question is whether the play-by-play money reaches the right people on time.

What does Boomplay versus Audiomack mean for artists?

For many African artists the practical choice is between two platforms with different strengths. Techeconomy frames it neatly: Boomplay, which started in Nigeria in 2015, is where regional culture gets "monetised more", while Audiomack is "where discovery begins". Both are bigger than their revenue lines suggest. Boomplay reported 98 million monthly active users at the end of 2023, and Audiomack said in January 2026 that it had passed 50 million monthly active users globally.

Reach is not the same as reliable payment, though. In December 2024 Sony Music pulled its catalogue from Boomplay, including titles distributed by The Orchard and AWAL. Music Business Worldwide reported that other rights holders had grown concerned about late royalty payments; Sony gave no public reason, and Boomplay didn't comment in that report. We could not confirm whether the catalogue has since returned, so we're not claiming either way.

Audiomack's notable move was on fraud. In June 2025 it brought in Beatdapp to identify bots, compromised accounts and other artificial activity, with the results feeding royalty reporting, chart placements and algorithmic playlists. Beatdapp has estimated that streaming fraud costs the industry around $2 billion a year.

Why do fake streams hurt small markets more?

Most subscription services pay from a pool: total revenue is split by each rights holder's share of total streams. A fake play doesn't steal from one artist; it shrinks everyone's slice. A 2025 ICML paper by Ghosh, Neoh, Teh and Tyrovolas found that the standard pro-rata rule used by streaming platforms fails to prevent fraud and makes manipulation computationally hard to detect.

Afrobeats Wire argues that the same volume of fraud is a bigger share of a small pool, so smaller markets feel it most. It also points out that none of Deezer, Apple Music, Spotify or France's Centre national de la musique has published a fraud rate for Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya or any other African market. Artists there are being asked to trust numbers nobody shows them.

What we think

The growth figures are being read as a success story, and in part they are. But growth on a small base hides who is being left out: artists outside South Africa, songwriters whose radio and venue plays are never licensed, and anyone whose royalties sit in a platform's delayed payment queue.

Three second-order effects follow. First, the winners are the operators who can count: platforms, distributors and the few collecting societies with working digital systems. Every gain in measurability shifts power towards whoever holds the data. Second, artists who rely on one platform carry that platform's payment risk directly, as the Boomplay episode showed. Third, fraud protection is becoming a feature that some services have and others don't, and in a pooled system an artist on a platform without it is effectively subsidising the bots.

The fix isn't glamorous. Platforms operating in Africa should publish market-level fraud and demonetisation figures, as some already do globally. Collecting societies should publish what they license and what they distribute, country by country. Until then, our advice to artists is practical: register your works with your local society, keep your metadata clean and consistent across distributors, spread releases across more than one platform, and never buy "guaranteed plays", which only shrinks the pool you're paid from. Ask your distributor in writing how it handles flagged streams and late DSP payments. The streams are coming. Make sure the money can find you.