Spotify reveals how much Nigerian artists made from music in 2025
Spotify, in an official report, confirmed how much Nigerian artists made from music in terms of revenue for the year 2025.
For years, the question of exactly how much money Nigerian artists make from streaming has lingered without a clear answer. On Monday, Spotify provided one.
The company disclosed in its annual Loud & Clear report, released in Lagos, that Nigerian artists generated over ₦60 billion in revenue from Spotify music streaming in 2025. The figure of roughly $43.8 million is the clearest window yet into the financial scale of an industry that has long been celebrated for its cultural reach but rarely quantified in hard naira.
According to the report, revenue earned by Nigerian artists from Spotify alone grew by more than 140 per cent over the past two years, a number that reframes the Afrobeats conversation from one about global influence to one about global income.
The ₦60 billion figure comes with context. Nigerian artists generated 30.3 billion streams and 1.6 billion listening hours on the platform in 2025, and their music was discovered by first-time listeners more than 1.3 billion times, a 26 per cent increase on the previous year.
At home, the dominance is near-total. More than 80 per cent of the tracks featured on Spotify Nigeria's Daily Top 50 were by Nigerian artists, while domestic listening of Nigerian music grew 170 per cent year-on-year.
Globally, the footprint is just as striking. Nigerian artists appeared in nearly 320 million user-generated playlists worldwide, while more than 60 million playlists featuring Nigerian artists were created on Spotify alone in 2025.
Perhaps the most significant detail buried in the data concerns who, exactly, is collecting the money. Independent creators are the biggest winners, taking home 58 per cent of all royalties generated by Nigerian artists on Spotify in 2025. It is a finding that challenges the long-held assumption that major label deals are the primary route to financial success in the Nigerian music industry.
The number of Nigerian artists earning at least ₦10 million annually from Spotify has also grown sharply, more than doubling since 2023 and tripling compared with 2022.
Local streams of Nigerian independent artists also grew by 75 per cent year-on-year, while local streams of Nigerian female artists rose by 55 per cent over the same period.
The 2025 figure did not arrive in isolation. In 2024, Nigerian artists generated over ₦58 billion in royalties from Spotify, more than double the ₦25 billion recorded in 2023 and about five times the estimated ₦11 billion earned in 2022. The trajectory, in other words, has been almost vertical.
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