Nigerian artists earned more than ₦60 billion from Spotify streams in 2025. A year earlier they earned about ₦58 billion. That is growth of 3.45 per cent, in a year when local streams of Nigerian music rose 170 per cent, according to Spotify’s Loud & Clear report.
The sound has never travelled further. This month a Chinese song built on an Afrobeats sound spread on TikTok, with users making dance videos to it, NewsclickNG reported on 8 October. The report doesn’t name the track or give a view count. What it shows is a sound made in Lagos being remade in Mandarin. The question for Nigeria is who is collecting on the way out.
Two years of growth
The jump came earlier. Nigerian artists’ Spotify royalties passed ₦25 billion in 2023, then rose to more than ₦58 billion in 2024, roughly double, according to Spotify figures reported by Nigerian outlets. The three years add up to ₦143 billion, or about $105.6 million, TechCabal reported.
The 2025 numbers are still large. Nigerian artists generated about 30.3 billion streams and 1.6 billion listening hours, and first-time listeners discovered Nigerian music more than 1.3 billion times, up 26 per cent on 2024. Spotify Wrapped 2025 says Afrobeats listeners grew 22 per cent worldwide. Since Spotify launched in Nigeria in February 2021, Afrobeats listening there is up 5,022 per cent and Amapiano’s is up 10,330 per cent, Music In Africa reports.
Spotify says Afrobeats streams in Latin America are up more than 400 per cent since 2020, with Brazil up 500 per cent. The Creative Brief, a newsletter on African media, noted that the figure comes with no baseline and no explanation of how it was calculated.
China is early
Afrobeats reached China slowly. The first Afrobeat festival in Beijing was held in 2010. Taiwanese artist Wu Bai’s 2016 album Ding Zi Hua was the first overt Afrobeat influence from a mainstream Chinese-market artist, according to Asian Pop Weekly, and a Ghanaian dance teacher has taught Afrobeats to Chinese students since the mid-2010s.
As of April 2023, Asian Pop Weekly described the genre there as niche, with few local musicians able to live from it. Language is a barrier: Sierra Leonean artist Mariatu Kargbo released her latest track in both English and Chinese.
Where the money goes
Streams don’t pay the same everywhere. Spotify told TechCabal that an artist’s royalties depend on their share of streams in each market. In 2025, Nigeria’s ₦60 billion across 30.3 billion streams works out to about ₦1.98 a stream. A premium subscription costs about $1.17 in Nigeria against about $13.78 in Sweden, according to the same report. TechCabal quoted media expert Akíntúndé Babátúndé saying Nigerian artists “could still earn less than someone with just one million fans in a high-income country.”
Ownership is the older worry. In July 2023, BusinessDay reported that Burna Boy, Wizkid, Davido, CKay and Tiwa Savage all had deals with foreign labels. Chidi Okeke, founder of Groove Platforms, told the paper that labels now set artists’ prices and decide where music is heard, which puts artists out of reach of local promoters.
Then there is the sound. In January 2026, the Guardian Nigeria quoted Kenny Keke Ogungbe, CEO of Kennis Music, saying Afrobeats is “becoming more universal, but also more generic”. He argued that streaming algorithms reward songs that fit neatly into international playlists.
What the data says against that
The newest numbers cut the other way on language and ownership. Global listening to Nigerian indigenous-language music grew 141 per cent in 2024 and 41 per cent in 2025, according to Music In Africa. About 58 per cent of the royalties Nigerian artists earned on Spotify in 2025 went to independent artists or labels, and streams of independent artists rose 75 per cent.
Afrobeats is not shrinking. Its exports are growing faster than its payouts, and the people deciding where the music is heard and what it earns are not always the people who made it.
