Nigeria’s music exports grew by 49 per cent over the past three years due to the Afrobeats boom, according to Spotify, streaming giant.
This is as global listeners spend an average of over 1.1 million hours streaming Nigerian artistes, with users creating approximately 250 million playlists featuring Nigerian artistes worldwide, Spotify revealed during the release of the 2024 Loud & Clear report, according to BusinessDay.
Jocelyne Muhutu-Remy, managing director for Spotify Africa, stated on Thursday that data showed that Afrobeats was the fastest-growing genre in the world in 2024, pointing to markets like France and the Netherlands, where Nigerian music is gaining traction. She forecast that the UK and U.S. markets would become major hubs for Nigerian music in the coming years.
Beyond global growth, the local consumption of Nigerian content has grown 206 per cent year-on-year, with a 782 per cent increase over the past three years, showing a significant rise in Nigeria’s appetite for local content.
Economic wins, industry growth
This boom translated to a ₦58 billion payout from Spotify to Nigerian artistes in 2024 alone, a figure that is more than double the previous year’s total.
Muhutu-Remy emphasised the power of user-generated and editorial playlists in boosting artistes’ discovery, noting that new Nigerian artistes were discovered 1 billion times worldwide on Spotify. Spotify revealed that more than 1,900 Nigerian artistes were added to Spotify editorial playlists—33 per cent more than in 2023.
“Discovery is an essential feature of streaming, and Spotify is particularly good at helping artists be discovered,” she said. “It means that if you’re in Oslo, in Tokyo, or wherever, you can discover or listen to a Nigerian artist for the first time. This is the mainstreaming and normalising of our sounds in people’s lives worldwide.”
