When Audiomack announced it had crossed 50 million monthly active users in January 2026, the headline sounded like a milestone. It was also a provocation. Africa’s most user-heavy streaming platform — Boomplay, with roughly 95 million monthly active users across the continent — has spent the past year embroiled in a royalty crisis that threatens to unravel its decade of market dominance. In the battle for African music streaming, size is no longer the only measure of who controls the money.
The question of which platform actually puts money in African artists’ pockets is complicated, contested, and increasingly urgent.
The Numbers Gap — and What It Hides
Boomplay’s raw user count is substantial. Launched in 2015 through a joint venture between Chinese technology company NetEase and Transsion Holdings — the manufacturer behind Africa’s bestselling budget smartphones — Boomplay has leveraged pre-installation on Transsion handsets to build reach across 47 markets. Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, Côte d’Ivoire: the platform claims 86 percent of its user base is in sub-Saharan Africa.
Audiomack’s 50 million global figure is smaller, but the composition is revealing. Nigeria accounts for 15.3 million of those users — making it the platform’s largest single market worldwide. The platform logged 58 billion Afrobeats streams in Nigeria alone in its first five years, according to its December 2024 anniversary report. Audiomack is not trying to be everywhere at once. It is trying to own the market that matters most to African music.
The strategic difference is legible in their infrastructure. Boomplay competes on distribution — the Transsion partnership means the app arrives on handsets before users have made any active choice. Audiomack competes on intent. Its users sought the platform out. That difference shapes everything from ad revenue quality to royalty exposure.
What Platforms Actually Pay
Neither Boomplay nor Audiomack publishes a fixed per-stream royalty rate. Both operate on ad-and-subscription revenue models where payouts fluctuate monthly based on platform-wide performance. That opacity is itself a form of risk for artists.
Estimates for Boomplay place per-stream payouts between $0.0025 and $0.0064, with most third-party royalty calculators landing near the lower end. Audiomack’s monetisation program — the AMP, which pays eligible creators 50 percent of the ad and subscription revenue their streams generate — yields approximately $0.001 to $0.005 per stream depending on the month.
For comparison: Apple Music pays roughly $0.01 per stream; Spotify pays around $0.0032 globally, though African-market streams generate less due to lower local subscription prices and advertising rates. The published rates, however, are only meaningful if platforms actually pay them.
That is where Boomplay’s crisis becomes impossible to ignore.
The Royalty Reckoning
In December 2024, Sony Music pulled its entire catalogue from Boomplay. The stated reason: unpaid royalties going back to at least April 2023 — an 18-month gap that industry sources told trade publications may stretch even further. Sony’s withdrawal cascaded. Its distribution subsidiaries The Orchard and AWAL followed. So did Merlin, the digital rights agency representing thousands of independent labels globally.
The catalogue losses were immediate and visible. Wizkid’s Made in Lagos. Davido’s Timeless. Tems’ Born in the Wild. Ruger, Simi, Lojay — catalogue after catalogue vanished from a platform that had spent nearly a decade marketing itself on the depth of its African music offering.
The crisis is not confined to global majors. Kenyan producer Ares 66 publicly condemned Boomplay over unpaid royalties — a signal that the non-payment pattern affects independent African artists and producers, not only the labels with resources to pursue legal remedies.
Boomplay has not disclosed a public resolution. Its last major funding round — a $20 million Series A in 2019 — raises questions about whether the platform’s ad and subscription revenue has ever been sufficient to sustain both operating costs and royalty obligations at scale. No new investment has been publicly announced since.
Boomplay did not respond to a request for comment on the royalty payment status or the timeline for catalogue restoration.
Who Controls the Label Relationships
The structural difference in how these platforms license music tells a more granular story.
Boomplay built its catalogue through direct licensing deals with major labels: Universal Music Group signed on first, in 2018; Warner Music Group followed; Sony Music — until December — had its own direct arrangement. Major Nigerian independents including Mavin Records and Chocolate City were also direct partners. Direct deals theoretically offer better reporting transparency for rights holders. In practice, they created counterparty risk that has now materialised in full.
Audiomack’s approach was more cautious. Independent artists reach the platform through distributors — TuneCore, DistroKid, CD Baby, Ditto, Amuse — creating a layer between the platform and rights exposure. Warner Music signed a licensing deal covering five African markets in 2020 and expanded it in February 2025 to 47 additional countries, including Uganda, Zimbabwe, and much of Europe and the Caribbean — a significant validation of Audiomack’s trajectory.
The UMG acquisition of a majority stake in Mavin Global, completed in 2024, adds another layer to the licensing map. Rema, Ayra Starr, and Johnny Drille’s catalogues now flow through UMG’s licensing infrastructure — which means the commercial terms Mavin receives on any DSP, including Boomplay and Audiomack, are now set by one of the world’s largest rights holders.
Audiomack did not respond to a request for comment on AMP payout rates in African markets.
The Diaspora Income Problem
Here is the irony at the centre of African music economics in 2026: the streaming platforms that pay African artists the most are largely inaccessible to their home audiences.
Spotify is not available in Nigeria. Apple Music operates behind a paywall that prices out the majority of listeners in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and Tanzania. Yet Spotify paid Nigerian and South African artists $59 million in 2024 — a figure that roughly doubled year-on-year. Nigerian music consumption on Spotify grew 146 percent in 2024, largely driven by diaspora and international listeners discovering Afrobeats. Afrobeats listeners on Spotify grew 22 percent globally in 2025.
The arithmetic is clarifying: an African artist’s most financially valuable streams come from people who do not live in Africa, on a platform most Africans cannot access, while their domestic audience listens on platforms that either pay fractional rates or — in Boomplay’s case — may not pay at all.
Burna Boy’s streaming profile illustrates the split. He has accumulated 11.9 billion streams across platforms: 6.6 billion on Spotify, 2.5 billion on YouTube, 1.1 billion on Audiomack. His billion-stream Audiomack milestone was widely covered as a historic African achievement; the financial yield, at an average AMP rate of roughly $0.005 per stream, amounts to approximately $5 million — respectable, but a fraction of what equivalent Spotify streams from premium Western markets would generate.
Who Actually Wins
For African artists today, the streaming equation works in tiers. Signed artists with major label backing — Rema, Ayra Starr, Asake — benefit from UMG or Sony’s negotiating power and global distribution, collecting meaningful royalties from Western Spotify streams while also accumulating the visibility that Boomplay and Audiomack provide at home. The platforms function for them as audience-building infrastructure, not primary revenue.
For independent artists, the calculus is different. Audiomack’s free upload model and AMP program have become a de facto launch pad for Nigerian and Ghanaian artists: Bloody Civilian and Shallipopi both built initial audiences on free-upload platforms before label conversations began. The AMP’s 50-percent revenue share, at an average of $0.003 per stream, yields approximately $3,000 from one million streams before distributor fees. That is not a living wage, but it is accessible, reliable, and paid.
Reliable and paid are, increasingly, the competitive advantage. If Boomplay cannot demonstrate it has resolved its royalty backlog — and there is no public evidence that it has — the platform’s scale advantage will continue to erode. Catalogue without rights holder trust is not a product. It is a liability.
Audiomack’s 31-percent year-over-year user growth suggests it is picking up beneficiaries of that erosion. The question for 2026 is whether a platform that built its identity around Nigeria can expand east and south quickly enough to fill the vacuum Boomplay’s crisis is creating — and whether it can sustain royalty payments at scale as it does.
Africa’s music economy is generating real money. Who captures it, and who gets paid on time, is still very much unsettled.
Sourcing: Boomplay royalty crisis: Digital Music News, Complete Music Update, Music Ally (December 2024); Ares 66 commentary: TNX Africa. Audiomack MAU figures: Music Business Worldwide, Hypebot (January 2026); Nigeria MAU: Music Ally (December 2024). Sony/Boomplay catalogue removal: BusinessDay Nigeria, Music In Africa. Boomplay per-stream estimates: RouteNote, Tooxclusive, Freecords. Audiomack AMP mechanics: Audiomack Help Center. Warner/Audiomack expansion: Techpoint Africa, Variety (February 2025). Spotify Africa royalties: Bizcommunity, Reuters (2024 data); Nigerian growth: Techpoint Africa. Burna Boy streaming totals: TRT Afrika, Pulse Nigeria, Legit.ng. Mavin/UMG deal: Music Ally, Foreign Policy (2024). Boomplay and Audiomack did not respond to requests for comment.
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