$120 MILLION AND RISING, AFRICA’S MUSIC ECONOMY HITS A NEW HIGH

For the second consecutive year, Sub-Saharan Africa finds itself among the fastest-growing recorded music markets on the planet. The IFPI’s Global Music Report 2026, released on 18 March, puts the region’s 2025 revenues at US$120 million a 15.2% increase over the prior year placing it joint second globally alongside the Middle East and North Africa, behind only Latin America’s 17.1% surge. A year earlier, the region grew 22.6%, becoming the first time it crossed the US$100 million mark. What was once a footnote in IFPI’s annual assessment is now a chapter in its own right.

To understand why, you have to start with the phone in someone’s pocket. Affordable smartphones and rapidly expanding mobile data networks have given tens of millions of listeners across the continent their first real access to licensed music not piracy, not radio, but on-demand streaming. The continent did not transition from CDs to digital; it arrived in the digital era already native to it. Streaming now accounts for the overwhelming majority of the region’s revenues, and at 15.2% growth, Sub Saharan Africa is expanding at more than double the global average of 6.4%. Globally, the industry hit an all-time high of US$31.7 billion in 2025 its eleventh consecutive year of growth. Africa’s $120 million is less than 0.4% of that figure. That gap is not a discouragement; it is the entire point.

South Africa anchors the region, accounting for 78.1% of Sub-Saharan Africa’s total revenues after posting 12.9% growth in 2025. Amapiano’s global expansion, Tyla’s continued international ascent, and Kabza De Small’s mid-2025 album debuting on the Spotify Global Album Charts a first for an amapiano project have made South Africa’s cultural footprint undeniable. But the most telling growth story is happening further north. Nigerian artists generated US$43.8 million on Spotify alone in 2025, a 140% increase over just two years, accumulating 30.3 billion streams and 1.6 billion listening hours. Local consumption of Nigerian music on the platform grew 170% year-on-year. Perhaps most significantly, independent artists and labels captured approximately 58% of those royalties a figure that signals a fundamental rewiring of who controls the value chain.

Ghana’s Amaarae and Stonebwoy featured prominently in Apple Music’s regional year-end charts, while East African bongo flava continued building cross-border momentum, even as formal revenue data for those markets remains undercounted.
Yet the growth comes with a warning embedded in the same report that celebrates it. IFPI CEO Victoria Oakley called streaming fraud “theft, plain and simple” and the numbers back the alarm. Deezer alone reported receiving over 60,000 fully AI-generated tracks every single day in January 2026, with 85% of streams on AI-generated music classified as fraudulent, up 70% from the year before. For African artists, this is not an abstract industry problem. In markets where streaming is virtually the only revenue channel no meaningful physical sales, limited sync income, nascent live infrastructure a diluted royalty pool is a direct cut to an artist’s livelihood. The threat compounds when you add the unresolved question of AI and copyright: much of the training data behind commercially deployed generative music tools was assembled without licensing agreements, and the African music catalogue vast, diverse, and frequently underdocumented is among the most vulnerable to unlicensed extraction

IFPI’s Sub-Saharan Africa regional director Angela Ndambuki put it plainly: the region’s growth “builds on several years of strong performance and highlights the combined impact of record company investment, the growing global influence of African artists, and increasing adoption of licensed streaming services.” But she was equally clear that AI must be “anchored in strong copyright frameworks that protect artists and ensure fair remuneration.

The infrastructure collecting societies, rights registries, anti-fraud enforcement has not yet scaled to match the creative and commercial momentum. That is the work of the next five years.
Sub-Saharan Africa is not a market growing toward the global music industry. It is a market the global music industry is growing toward. The $120 million is not a ceiling. It is a floor and the distance between where it stands and where it could go remains one of the most significant untapped opportunities in the business of music today.

Sources: IFPI Global Music Report 2026 (18 March 2026) · Music In Africa · Spotify Loud & Clear 2025 · Apple Music Sub-Saharan Africa Year-End Chart 2025