Swedish audio streaming giant Spotify has shed fresh light on how it calculates and pays royalties to artistes, even as it revealed that Nigerian musicians were Africa’s top earners in 2025, pocketing over $42 million (Sh5.4 billion).
Spotify’s royalty payout model has long been a thorny debate, repeatedly drawing scrutiny over whether the platform deals fairly with artists.
Globally, industry critics often argue that, in the grand orchestra of streaming revenue, Spotify keeps a bigger share of the revenue than the payout it makes to creators.
In its latest annual Loud & Clear report, which the streaming service introduced to offer transparency on the often-murky economics of streaming, it explains its model of how artists make their money on the platform.
“Artists get paid based on their share of total streams on Spotify. If your music accounts for one percent of all streams, you get roughly one percent of the royalty pool. That’s what people mean when they talk about streamshare.
"In 2025, artists who accounted for one in every one million streams on Spotify generated over $11,000 (Sh1.42 billion), on average. Let’s put streaming numbers into context. What might have been a lot of streams even five years ago looks pretty different today. In fact, more than 400,000 songs were streamed more than a million times in 2025 alone. It would take more than 2.5 years of nonstop listening to hear them all.” states the report.
The report also noted that Nigerian musicians continue to be Africa’s top earners on the platform in 2025, raking in more than $42 million (Sh5.4 billion) from streams.
According to the report, over the past two years, revenue generated by Nigerian musicians on Spotify has surged by more than 140 per cent, fuelled by a potent mix of rising local listenership and diaspora audience. At home, the appetite is also high, with local streams of Nigerian music leaping 170 per cent year-on-year.
Globally, in 2025 alone, Nigerian artists pulled in 30.3 billion streams, translating into over 1.6 billion hours of listening time. Discovery is also on overdrive, with first-time listeners finding Nigerian tracks more than 1.3 billion times, a 26 per cent jump from the previous year.
The growth is not one-note, with Nigerian female artists rising in volume and visibility, with streams climbing 55 per cent year-on-year. Independent artists, often the industry’s restless innovators, saw an even sharper spike at 75 per cent.
The report shows that independent musicians and music labels accounted for 58 per cent of all royalties paid to Nigerian artists on Spotify in 2025, signalling a shift toward a more decentralised, artist-driven ecosystem.
The data also shows that Nigerian music was widely embraced globally, as it found a home in nearly 320 million user-generated playlists worldwide, alongside more than 12 million curated within Nigeria itself.
Altogether, over 60 million playlists featuring Nigerian artists were created on the platform in 2025.
The report further notes that the number of artists earning at least $10 million (Sh1.29 billion) has increased in the last decade from one to over 80 artists, with each generating over $10 million (Sh1.29 billion) annually from the platform.
“As global superstars have graduated to the $10 million level, a whole class of career artists have reached the $1 million (Sh129 million) level. In 2025, more than 1,500 artists generated over $1 million in royalties from Spotify alone. Many of them aren’t household names, and they may never trend globally. In fact, capturing just 1 percent of streams from 1 percent of listeners (a small fraction of a small fraction) is enough to earn $1 million in annual royalties from Spotify. The streaming era isn’t narrowing success to a few global stars. You don’t need global ubiquity to build a meaningful career, more artists than ever are generating million-dollar incomes at scale,” notes the report.
Equally, in 2025, there were more than 13,800 artists who generated at least $100,000 (Sh12.9 million) a year from the platform, with nearly 1,400 more than in 2024.
“There are now more artists generating over $100,000 (Sh12.9 million) annually from Spotify than there were generating half that amount just five years ago. Eight in ten artists who crossed the $100K threshold in 2022 have remained above it every year since. A majority of the new $100K artists debuted in the 2020s, and 85 percent are based outside the US,” notes the report.
