Nigeria’s success in music keeps prompting a reasonable question: why doesn’t the country own a streaming platform with global reach? The ambition is easy to understand. Building a service that can compete with established platforms is a much harder proposition.
The call for a Nigerian service that could compete globally with Spotify and Apple Music captures a real desire for local ownership. But a platform is more than an app with Nigerian music on it: it needs licensed catalogue, reliable payments, a way to reach listeners and enough revenue to keep operating.
Nigerian artists have built audiences across major markets, but success in music does not supply the catalogue licences, payment systems, customer support and capital a streaming company needs to survive. Those are the constraints a Nigerian challenger would have to solve.
Why Building a Nigerian Streaming Platform Is Harder Than It Sounds
Spotify launched in 2008 and spent years building the product, catalogue relationships and economics that allowed it to scale. The important comparison is not simply age. It is the amount of capital, licensing access and distribution reach that a Nigerian challenger would need to assemble before it could compete on the same terms.
Apple Music launched in 2015 with Apple’s wider ecosystem behind it, substantial financial resources and existing relationships across the music industry.
A new entrant today would also be competing for listeners who already have established streaming habits, playlists and libraries on services with much larger budgets.
I remember when Spinlet launched in 2012 and Nigerian Twitter genuinely believed it might work. There was real energy behind it, real users, real hope. And it still died quietly, without ceremony, the way most of these things do. Not because the founders were incompetent, but because the wall they hit was not a product problem. It was a structural one. And that wall has only gotten taller since.
I can’t wait for the day a Nigerian builds a streaming platform that can stand shoulder to shoulder with Spotify & Apple Music globally.
Nigerians are too creative for us not to own a piece of the global tech & music infrastructure.
— JBRANDY (@JbrandyOfficial) March 6, 2026
The Licensing Wall Nobody Mentions
Building the app is honestly the easy part.
Getting the music onto it legally is where everything falls apart.
A service aiming to rival Spotify’s catalogue would need licensing agreements with Universal Music Group, Sony Music and Warner Music, which control a large share of commercially distributed recorded music globally. Negotiating with major rightsholders requires capital, legal expertise and credible plans for reporting, royalty accounting and payment. Spotify’s own expansion depended on securing catalogue licences while building a product and audience that could support the costs. A Nigerian entrant would need to show not only that it could obtain rights, but that it had the capital, audience potential and operational capacity to make those licences commercially viable. The terms and difficulty would vary by deal.
The Top 50 Problem
A small group of top Nigerian artists accounts for a large share of the industry’s streaming revenue, and a substantial portion of their audience sits outside Nigeria. That creates another challenge for a local platform: to attract the biggest catalogues, it may need international users as well as Nigerian listeners.
Burna Boy has an arrangement with Atlantic, Wizkid has a Sony-linked structure through Starboy, and many other major Nigerian artists have international label or distribution relationships. The specific control and recoupment terms vary by contract, but those relationships can make catalogue migration more complicated than simply asking an artist to upload elsewhere.
For a new service, the practical first step would be to map the rights behind the catalogue it hopes to carry: who controls each recording, which territories are licensed, and whether an existing distributor or label has approval rights. An artist’s international deal does not automatically make every Nigerian service impossible, but an artist’s personal support alone may not be enough to clear the music.
Davido’s 5ive Alive Tour shows exactly how much revenue these artists generate outside Nigeria
Spinlet, Udux and MINO Already Tried
This is not a new idea and the people who tried it were not fools.
Spinlet had funding, had a product, had the timing of Nigeria’s smartphone boom behind it and still faded.
Udux came later with a stronger African cultural positioning, but its current status and reach are not clearly documented in the public record.
MINO grew out of NotJustOk, which had built substantial credibility with Nigerian music audiences. That gave it a potential route to artists and listeners, but an existing audience does not by itself establish whether a distribution business can become sustainable at scale.
These examples suggest that execution alone cannot solve the problem. Licensing, user acquisition, payment behaviour and the cost of maintaining a large catalogue can make the economics difficult even for teams with strong cultural credibility and a real audience.
The Attempts That Got Closest
Before you cite Boomplay as proof that it can work, it is worth understanding what actually happened with the three platforms that came the closest.
iROKING: The First Real Attempt
iROKING launched in December 2011 as a free Nigerian music streaming service built by iROKO Partners — the same company behind iROKOtv. Jason Njoku had just come from an investor conference where he met the founders of Saavn, the Indian streaming platform doing for Bollywood what Spotify was doing in Europe. He saw the same opportunity in Nigeria and believed iROKO had the right infrastructure to attempt it.
The ambition was real. iROKO Partners was already YouTube’s biggest African partner, with distribution deals covering iTunes, Amazon, Dailymotion and Vimeo. iROKING had mobile apps on iOS, Android, Windows and Symbian, covering every major handset category in Nigeria at the time.
iROKING’s consumer service eventually faded; its Android app was removed from Google Play in December 2017, and the service was no longer active by 2020. Its failure is useful because it shows that having a recognisable brand, existing distribution relationships and a local audience does not automatically produce a sustainable streaming business.
Njoku later described serious disputes with artists over royalties and the difficulty of getting the business to work commercially. Accounts of those disputes include a reported N200 million lawsuit over a revenue disagreement, but that figure should not be mistaken for a proven measure of unpaid royalties. His broader point was that building a distribution system and signing artists did not guarantee enough revenue to sustain it. iROKOtv later exited the Nigerian market in 2023 after struggling to make local paid streaming work, while continuing to serve audiences outside Nigeria.
The iROKING story matters because Njoku had several advantages a Nigerian founder would want — capital, an existing platform, diaspora reach, label relationships and technical infrastructure — and the business still struggled to become sustainable.
Boomplay: The Closest Thing to Success — and Why It Is Different
Boomplay launched in Nigeria in 2015, developed by Transsnet Music Limited a joint venture between Chinese phone maker Transsion Holdings and Chinese internet giant NetEase.
This is the detail worth keeping in view whenever Boomplay is cited as proof that an African streaming platform can work: its ownership, capital base and handset distribution were not the same as those available to a typical Nigerian startup. It was built for African users, but backed by Chinese companies with much larger commercial resources.
Distribution was a major advantage. Boomplay has been bundled or preinstalled on some Transsion smartphones, including Tecno, Infinix and Itel devices. Where that arrangement applies, it reduces the friction of getting users to discover and install the app. It is a meaningful advantage for a streaming service, although its reach and value depend on the device, market and commercial arrangement.
By 2019, Boomplay had announced licensing deals with Universal, Warner and Sony. Its backing from Transsion and NetEase gave Boomplay a different starting point from a typical early-stage Nigerian startup, though the public record does not establish that ownership alone explains how those deals were secured. In 2019, the platform announced a $20 million Series A funding round and reported 44 million app downloads. Downloads measure installs rather than active listeners, so they should not be read as a count of regular users. Industry reporting put Boomplay at more than 98 million monthly active users at the end of 2023.
But even Boomplay hit a wall. In late 2024 Sony Music pulled its full catalogue from the platform amid growing concerns at multiple rightsholders about late royalty payments. The company that cracked the licensing game with the three majors was struggling to keep those deals alive less than five years later.
Boomplay is evidence that there is a substantial African streaming market. It is not, by itself, evidence that a Nigerian-owned platform would face the same economics, capital base or distribution advantages.
Mdundo: The Model That Might Actually Fit the Market
Mdundo was founded in Kenya in 2013 by Danish founders. That background is worth noting, but the more relevant question is how its business model responds to the realities of the markets it serves.
Mdundo’s early strategy was built around a practical observation: many listeners in its target markets were already downloading MP3s for free, while paid streaming subscriptions remained out of reach for some. Rather than making a subscription the only route in, it built a service around free listening and advertising. The often-cited estimate of 150 million monthly piracy downloads should be treated as a reported market estimate, not an independently verified count.
Mdundo’s model is straightforward: it licenses music from artists and labels, serves advertising around listening, and shares revenue with rights holders under its agreements. Users do not need a paid subscription, which removes one barrier in markets where card payments and monthly fees can limit adoption. The model still depends on advertising demand, usage and the terms of each rights deal.
Mdundo reported 40.5 million monthly active users by June 2025, up 12.5% year on year. In September 2025, the company said more than 300,000 artists had collectively earned $1 million in royalties between January and July that year. It also reported partnerships with MTN Nigeria and Glo. These are company-reported figures; they show scale and distribution, but not how much the average artist received. The business picture has since changed. In its 2025/26 annual report, published on September 28, 2026, Mdundo reported revenue of DKK 8.3 million, down 24.5% year on year. Subscription revenue fell 18.5% to DKK 7.1 million, and advertising revenue fell 51.1% to DKK 1.1 million. The company also shifted its primary non-financial measure from monthly active users to paying subscribers. Direct and mobile-app subscriptions grew but remained a small share of total subscription revenue; mobile-money and card transactions rose from 2,100 in Q2 to 18,000 in Q4. The lesson is not that the free model has failed, but that audience reach alone is not enough if the company cannot convert usage into reliable revenue.
Those numbers sound small next to Spotify’s billions. Mdundo combines free, ad-supported access with paid subscriptions distributed through telecom partners, so it serves a different mix of users from Spotify. Whether the model can grow further depends on advertising income, catalogue breadth and the royalties its usage can support.
Mdundo’s catalogue figures need to be read carefully. In its FY2024/25 reporting, the company listed about 839,000 songs available directly from artists, alongside 3.9 million licensed global tracks. Those categories are not identical to a count of licensed African recordings, but they show that describing the service as having only around 200,000 tracks is out of date. Its free, ad-supported model is different from the subscription-led ambitions associated with iROKING and Spinlet; the key question is whether advertising and licensing economics can sustain it.
The Fragmentation Trap
There is a reason piracy exploded when music went digital in the early 2000s.
People did not pirate only because they wanted free music. Legal options could be fragmented, expensive and inconvenient, with different songs spread across platforms and subscriptions. For listeners managing limited data, payment options and phone storage, downloading a file could simply be easier.
A Nigerian-only service could recreate some of that friction if it asks listeners to pay for another app without offering a catalogue, experience or artist access they cannot get elsewhere.
You are asking a fan in Toronto who listens to Afrobeats, UK drill and American R&B to pay for Spotify and also pay for your Nigerian platform just to access content that Spotify already has. That gives listeners an extra subscription to manage without offering enough additional value to justify it. Local ownership alone is not a compelling product proposition.
Can a Nigerian Streaming Platform Actually Work?
A service could have a chance if it avoids trying to reproduce Spotify feature for feature. It would need a focused offer—such as direct artist-to-fan payments, exclusive releases or live-event access—that gives artists and listeners a clear reason to use it alongside global services. Those are opportunities to test, not advantages a Nigerian company can assume it already has.
Mdundo offers an example of a free, ad-supported model aimed at listeners who may not pay for subscriptions. Boomplay shows that a large African streaming audience can be built with the right distribution and backing. iROKING is a reminder that a recognisable brand and a catalogue do not guarantee a sustainable business.
Boomplay is a useful comparison, but its ownership matters: it was built with the backing of Transsion and NetEase, not the resources typically available to a local startup. That does not settle whether a Nigerian-owned service could work; it shows how much capital, distribution and licensing leverage the business may require.
Nigerian artists already have audiences at home and abroad, but that demand alone does not solve the costs of licensing music, reaching listeners and keeping them on the service. A platform would still need a catalogue it can legally offer, affordable distribution and a clear reason for people to change their habits.
Building something Nigerian would not automatically make it competitive. The useful benchmark is not whether the app carries Nigerian music; it is whether the product gives artists and listeners something materially better or more valuable than the global services they already use. That is the harder test.