Nigerians are increasing their earnings from Spotify, TikTok, YouTube, X and other platforms as content creation booms in Africa’s most populous nation.
Nigerian artistes earned over N58 billion in royalties from Spotify in 2024. This is more than double the amount paid by Spotify in 2023 and five times greater than in 2022, according to Spotify’s 2024 Loud & Clear report, released this week.
Jocelyne Muhutu-Remy, managing director for Spotify Africa, said in Lagos on Thursday that the payouts reflect the rising global demand for Nigerian music and Spotify’s commitment to supporting artists.
“Discovery is an essential feature of streaming, and Spotify is particularly good at helping artists be discovered,” she said.
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“It means that if you’re in Oslo, in Tokyo, or wherever, you can discover or listen to a Nigerian artiste for the first time. This is the mainstreaming and normalising of our sounds in people’s lives worldwide.”
According to Playboard’s ‘Super Chat Revenue’ data, an analytics website, Jerry Eze, popular pastor, is Nigeria’s highest YouTube earner, through his prayer videos. He earns N7 million every day and grossed N7 billion between 2014 and 2024. Eze popularised the phrase, ‘What God Cannot Do Does Not Exist,’ and he has garnered over two million subscribers.
Mark Angel, born in 1991, has a large number of followers on YouTube, attracting them with his comedic series. One platform, Seosandwitch.com, estimates that he earned $300,000 to $500,000 by 2023. BuinessDay’s earlier estimate was that he earns $4.2 million in annual revenues from YouTube.
Christian Kedibe, a YouTube addict, said he made over N23 million from the channel in four years, noting he has already made one-thirds of that this year.
“It is all about the content you have. It has to resonate with the people,” he said.
It is not just Spotify and YouTube. Nigerians are also making money on X (formerly Twitter) by selling products or quality content.
Tolu Adedeji, a 27-year-old social media influencer, told BusinessDay how he left banking career to begin content creation in all the platforms, including X.
“I started content creation in 2022 as a side gig, but with the way things are going, my earnings in dollars now outweigh my salary at the bank.”
In 2024, Meta said that Nigerian social media content creators on its platform would pocket as much as N150,000 for every 10,000 views on their content from July 1, 2024.
Videos are more compelling
Young Nigerians prefer watching videos to reading texts, social media experts say.
According to Samuel Ijaola, founder and CEO of GSMNS Global, a pro-Africa social media management firm, video contents are more compelling and keep people hooked, noting that they are ideal for storytelling.
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“Video will continue to dominate social media. Almost every platform is now focused on video content—TikTok, Snapchat, Twitter [now X], Instagram, you can name them. Even platforms that didn’t originally focus on videos are shifting to that direction. Monetisation of videos is only going to increase. It’s already happening on most major platforms, and the trend will continue,” he said, as earlier reported by BusinessDay.
“When you’re inside the bus or walking on the street, you will see people looking into their phones, and most of them will be watching videos. Their attention will be so focused on the video they are watching, and you will see them smiling or giving other reactions to the video,” added Ijaola, whose team manages up to 1000 content creators across Africa.
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