Nigeria shines as Spotify pays music industry $10bn in 2024

Music streaming monster, Spotify says it paid a record $10 billion in royalties to the music industry in 2024. Nigeria is the only African country showing tremendous growth in the streaming market at this time.
This payout brings Spotify’s total payout to nearly $60 billion since its inception in 2008. Today, Spotify says it has more than 500 million paying listeners across all music streaming services.
According to the company, its strategy in growing its subscription services to the most popular and highest paying included prioritizing retention through personalization, curation, and delivering innovative products like AI DJ, Daylist, and the viral annual Spotify Wrapped.
The option of ad-supported streams has helped to attract consumers who would later become paying users.
According to the company’s latest report, 60% of Premium subscribers were once free tier users.
Spotify highlighted its availability in multiple markets where they offer local entry prices as a major factor in its growth.
This market segmentation and strategic focus on local engagements resulted in tremendous growth in markets like India, Brazil, Mexico, and Nigeria.
David Kaefer, Spotify’s vice president of music business, emphasized the importance of the growth, stating;
“We’re available in more markets and at local price points, meeting people where they are. A decade ago, there was a widely held view that you couldn’t monetize certain markets. But the journey of getting the world to pay for music means making long-term investments. Today, we’re seeing tremendous growth across markets like India, Brazil, Mexico, and Nigeria. These are places where our investments are paying off.”
Spotify has always maintained that Nigeria, South Africa, and Kenya are its top markets, which continue to show potential for tremendous growth.
In 2023, Spotify announced it paid out more than $16.8 million to Nigerian artists in 2023.
As always, these payouts go to the rights holders of those artists, with the amount going to the musicians depending on their contracts. Spotify also said that the number of Nigerian artists earning more than $6.700 a year has quadrupled since 2018, with more than half of those royalties going to independent artists and labels.
Another milestone of Spotify’s growth is captured in its payout which has increased exponentially since 2014.
In 2024, 10,000 artists generate over $100,000 per year from Spotify alone.
Nigeria’s growth is equally significant, as Spotify provides a medium through which artists can directly distribute their songs to consumers globally, exposing them to a limitless revenue pipeline.
David Kaefer, adds that Spotify intends to keep innovating to offer the best for fans and creators.
“Our goal is to help artists get their work in front of existing and future fans, continue to innovate on their behalf, and deliver it in a way that inspires people to pay for it, Onboarding people to paid streaming is precisely what has increased our payouts—tenfold—over the past decade.” Stated Kaefer.
Nigerian boasts of one of the world’s youngest populations which is attributed to the increase of local streaming numbers  thus attracting revenue retention in the ecosystem