The global popularity of South African artists and music is on the rise, opening up significant opportunities for creators on an international scale.
Amapiano, the homegrown South African genre, has seen tremendous growth, with over 1.9 billion streams in 2022 alone. The genre has grown beyond its home borders, with streams outside of Sub-Saharan Africa growing by more than 563% on Spotify in the last two years. The UK, US, Netherlands, Germany and Canada are a few of the countries outside Sub-Saharan Africa, listening to Amapiano. This is the power of music streaming.
Royalties
A quarter of all South African artists who generated more than R100,000 self-distribute their music on Spotify, using distributors like DistroKid, TuneCore, CD Baby, and others.
“Our continued commitment at Spotify is to ensure that professional artists can make a living from their art. By releasing the revenues that South African artists generated on our platform in 2022, we are not only keeping ourselves accountable, but also showing artists that it does pay to put your art out into the world,” says Jocelyne Muhutu-Remy, Spotify’s managing director for Sub-Saharan Africa.
Spotify generates music revenue from two sources: subscription fees from premium listeners and fees from advertisers on music on the Free tier.
Nearly 70% of that revenue is paid back as royalties to rights holders, who then pay the artists and songwriters, based on the agreed terms. These rights holders include record labels, publishers, independent distributors, performance rights organisations and collecting societies.