Communiqué 125: African music’s missing millions
MEDI has put a price tag on Africa’s weak music infrastructure: $286 million a year in Nigeria and Kenya alone.
1. Measuring the immeasurable
In June, the Music Economy Development Initiative (MEDI) launched a new online portal documenting the music industries of 55 countries, including every country in Africa. It is the first attempt to build a standardised, publicly accessible dataset that measures music not just as a cultural product, but as an economic sector.
Click on a country profile on the portal, and you will find information on everything from recorded music revenues to copyright legislation, collective management organisations, licensing frameworks, and broader economic indicators. Each profile is designed to determine whether the institutions needed to sustain a country’s music economy actually exist.
The first insights from the portal are striking. MEDI projects that, from 2027, Nigeria will fail to collect approximately $231.4 million in recorded music revenue every year, while Kenya will leave a further $54.6 million on the table. Together, almost $286 million generated by two of the continent’s most culturally influential music markets will never reach artists, songwriters, producers, and publishers.
The scale of that figure becomes even more remarkable when compared with the size of Africa’s music industry today. According to IFPI’s Global Music Report 2026, Sub-Saharan Africa’s entire recorded music market generated just $120 million in 2025. The region grew by an impressive 15.2%, making it the joint second-fastest-growing music market in the world; yet, it still accounted for less than 0.5% of global recorded music revenues. Nigeria’s projected uncollected revenue alone is almost twice the size of the continent’s current recorded music market.
Over the past decade, African music genres have become more popular globally. African artists headline arenas across Europe, North America, and Asia, dominating international streaming playlists and increasingly shaping the sound of popular music worldwide. Yet, while the music has travelled, the institutions that support it at home have struggled to keep pace.
That contradiction lies at the heart of MEDI’s work. Backed by the Centre for Music Ecosystem, Global Citizen, International Finance Corporation (IFC), and a coalition of industry and development partners, the initiative argues that Africa’s greatest music challenge is no longer producing talent, but building the copyright systems, licensing frameworks, collective management organisations, regulatory institutions and investment structures that allow countries to capture the full economic value of that talent.
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2. A $286-million-sized hole
MEDI’s headline-grabbing estimates of the Nigerian and Kenyan music industries are a measure of what the industries could be worth if the systems underpinning them worked as effectively as those in comparable markets.
To build the model, MEDI drew on six years of data from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC), and the International Confederation of Music Publishers (ICMP), covering 49 music markets. The initiative grouped countries with similar economic and demographic characteristics before applying a linear regression model to estimate how much recorded music revenue Nigeria and Kenya would generate under stronger institutional conditions.
“We essentially created one country made up of peer markets that mirrored Nigeria — based on population, income, size and other factors — and compared that model country against Nigeria,” Shain Shapiro, Executive Director of the Centre of Music Ecosystems, told Communiqué. The exercise was intended to answer a simple question: if countries with similar characteristics can collect significantly more value from music, what explains the gap?
Under that model, Nigeria’s unrealised opportunity totals $231.4 million annually. Around $136.3 million comes from neighbouring rights, the royalties owed to performers and producers when music is streamed, broadcast, played in public or sold physically, while another $95.1 million comes from songwriter and publisher collections. Kenya’s projected $54.6 million follows a similar split. MEDI describes the projections as deliberately conservative, assuming no dramatic economic growth, currency appreciation, or population shocks.
The obvious question is: where does all that money go?
Part of the answer lies in the economics of streaming. According to Spotify data, Nigerian artists received more than ₦60 billion in royalties in 2025 from over 30 billion streams. Yet, because streaming payouts are determined by local subscription prices, a million streams in Nigeria generate only a fraction of what the same audience would earn in markets such as Sweden or the United States. “You cannot expect the music industry to outperform the economic environment in which it operates. The output of any industry reflects the strength of the system behind it. The music industry doesn’t exist in a silo,” Afrobeats curator and media executive Melody Hassan told Communiqué.
This problem is largely a function of purchasing power and is unlikely to change without rising incomes and a larger base of paying subscribers.
The rest, however, never enters the system at all. Unlike streaming revenue, which flows through platforms such as Spotify and YouTube under direct licensing agreements, a significant portion of music income depends on collective management organisations (CMOs). These organisations license businesses such as broadcasters, hotels, and shopping malls to use copyrighted music, collect licence fees, and distribute royalties back to rights holders.
In Nigeria, however, that system has been shaped by years of institutional uncertainty. For much of the past decade, the Copyright Society of Nigeria (COSON) and the Musical Copyright Society of Nigeria (MCSN) were locked in legal and regulatory disputes over who had the authority to license musical works and collect royalties. COSON, which had been approved as the country’s sole collecting society in 2010, later had its licence withdrawn amid governance disputes, while MCSN, after years of litigation, was eventually reinstated as an approved collective management organisation. The prolonged conflict created uncertainty across the industry. Businesses were often unsure whom to pay, rights holders questioned whether collections would reach them, and many simply chose not to participate in the system at all.
In the absence of a proper collection framework, direct licensing agreements between rights owners and large commercial entities, such as mobile network operators, already exist and generate significant income. But this system remains haphazard and fragmented.
“The system is very disjointed. As a result, there’s a lot of leakage, which creates an environment that is very difficult to invest in,” Shapiro said.
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3. Counting the cost
MEDI’s ambition extends far beyond improving royalty collection. At its core is a much more fundamental proposition: that music should be treated as a development sector. For decades, African governments have largely viewed music as a cultural product, a source of entertainment, national identity, and soft power. While that view is important, MEDI argues that this framing has obscured music’s economic significance.
If music is instead recognised as an industry, it becomes easier to justify investments in copyright enforcement, licensing systems, skills development and regulatory reform in much the same way governments invest in agriculture, manufacturing or tourism. “A lot of people do not see music as part of the economy,” Shapiro said. “For most people, music is what happens after work, not what happens during work.”
MEDI plans to extend the Nigeria and Kenya model into forecasts for every African market, each freely available through the portal. A comprehensive national deep dive is underway in Côte d’Ivoire, designed to provide development finance institutions with the investment-grade feasibility data they require before committing capital. Most ambitious is the exploration, alongside a development bank, of a music impact fund to finance what Shapiro calls the tracks: copyright infrastructure, enforcement, education and policy. “We need to build the tracks so the trains can run,” he said. “Because there are lots of trains.”
The obvious criticism of MEDI’s numbers is that they describe money that could exist, not money that does. Nothing about the $286 million is guaranteed. Collecting it would require the very things that have failed in these markets for decades: new laws, actual enforcement, collection societies that work, and licensing deals with telcos and broadcasters that have never volunteered to pay. MEDI does not dispute this. The forecast is meant to show governments what a functioning system would be worth, so that fixing the system becomes worth their while.
And there are small signs that things can change. In February, the Nigerian Copyright Commission paid out ₦1.21 billion to MCSN under the private copying levy, a charge on devices capable of copying music that had sat unused in Nigerian law since 1988. The sum is less than 1% of Nigeria’s annual opportunity. But it is money that was never collected for 38 years.
That, in the end, is MEDI’s whole argument. African music has already won its cultural battle. Its ability to win the economic battle depends on institutions, and for the first time, someone has quantified the cost of their absence to the industry.
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The measurement gap and the payment gap are the same gap. Money does not route to work nobody has documented in a form the collecting bodies can read, and that is as true for an individual songwriter as it is for a national sector. A standardised dataset is the right first move because it makes the missing millions countable. I work on the ownership-record side for creators, and identification is always the blocker before economics.