Nigeria and Kenya are producing some of the most streamed music on the planet. Yet nearly $286 million in recorded music revenue from those two countries alone never reaches the people who made it, according to research from the Music Economy Development Initiative (MEDI), a partnership between the Center for Music Ecosystems and Global Citizen.
That figure lands at an awkward moment. In 2025, Sub Saharan Africa’s recorded music revenues climbed 15.2 percent to reach $120 million, according to IFPI’s Global Music Report 2026, with South Africa alone accounting for 78.1 per cent of total revenues after recording a 12.9 per cent increase within the year. Industry commentary treats every uptick like this as proof of momentum. But set the growth against what MEDI just measured in only two countries, and the celebration starts to look premature. The region is still collecting a fraction of what its listenership and cultural weight should generate.
Where the money actually goes missing
MEDI built an econometric model, working with economists at Sound Diplomacy and consultant Ieva Oxenbury, to answer a blunt question: how much money is being left on the table if nothing changes? Nigeria and Kenya were the first two countries to run through the model, and the results were stark. Nigeria’s industry loses an estimated $231 million annually due to deep rooted weaknesses in copyright protection, enforcement, collective rights management and royalty payment systems, while Kenya loses roughly $55 million annually. Add them together and you get the $286 million headline.
Nigerian artists were named Africa’s top earners on Spotify in 2025, pulling in more than $42 million as revenue from Nigerian musicians surged over 140 percent in two years. The consumption is there. The infrastructure to convert that consumption into income for the people who created it is not.
The research team behind MEDI put it plainly: this shortfall represents rent, groceries, and pension money that should belong to rights holders right now. It doesn’t reach them because, as the team frames it, the tracks were never built for the money to travel on.
A continent measured for the first time
Alongside the country level findings, MEDI completed Phase 2 of a data portal covering all 55 African countries, which organizers describe as the first platform to deliver comprehensive music industry data across the entire continent. The tool is aimed less at fans and more at the people who decide where investment flows next: policymakers, lenders, development finance institutions, and anyone weighing whether Africa’s music sector deserves serious capital.
That audience matters because the case for reform is already sitting in the numbers. Africa represents close to 18 percent of the world’s population but captures only about 0.3 percent of the total value of recorded music. Nigeria, despite producing some of the most exported sound on the planet right now, ranks as just the world’s 55th largest music market by size. The gap between cultural influence and financial return could hardly be wider.
D’Banj, the Nigerian artist and founder of the CREAM Platform, summed up the disconnect when MEDI launched its portal: “African music is a global business now, but the business still isn’t African enough.”
Why the plumbing is the real problem
The pattern MEDI is documenting has a name in policy circles: broken copyright collection, weak metadata systems, fragmented collective management organizations, and a distribution layer still largely controlled from outside the continent. Put together, these gaps mean value generated by African artists routinely gets captured somewhere else, by whoever owns the pipes rather than whoever made the music.
Kenya’s experience shows how this plays out on the ground. According to Kenya Copyright Board counsel Alex Omanga, part of the problem sits in how the country’s collective management organizations are legally structured, since they operate as private, member driven companies rather than as a unified public system. Nigeria faces a related gap: the absence of a communication to the public right for performers weakens artists’ control over how their own performances get commercially used, which means many miss out on revenue their work is generating in real time, even as local radio content quotas of 80 percent keep giving them airplay and audience reach.
None of this is fixed by data alone. A spreadsheet cannot rebuild a collective management organization or rewrite a copyright statute. But for years the industry’s infrastructure gap has been argued from instinct and anecdote rather than hard evidence, which makes it easy for governments and investors to deprioritize. Measurement will not repair broken systems by itself, but it removes the excuse for leaving them broken.
What comes next
MEDI’s partner list, which includes Universal Music Group, the International Finance Corporation, IFPI, and Nigeria’s Federal Ministry of Art, Culture, Tourism and the Creative Economy, signals where the pressure for reform is likely to come from next: institutions with the capital and leverage to demand better rights infrastructure as a condition of investment. A pilot study already underway with Côte d’Ivoire’s Ministry of Culture and Francophonie, alongside talk of a dedicated Music Impact Fund, suggests this data is meant to travel well beyond a report.
The bigger test is whether $286 million in identified, quantified loss is enough to force the plumbing to get fixed. Streaming numbers will keep climbing. African artists will keep topping global charts. The real progress will show up somewhere less visible: in whether the next country MEDI measures collects what its music actually earns, instead of watching that value flow out through someone else’s system.
