Mdundo hits $1 million in payouts to rights owners across Africa

The growth, the company says, is as a result of its strategy to provide a strong alternative to music piracy as well as the steady growth of Mdundo.com’s commercial performance.

In addition, the company expects rights owners to earn an additional $1 million in the period between July 2021 to June 2022 from the service, providing rights owners with an another channel to earn revenue on the music.

Mdundo currently boasts 20.3m monthly active users, a 74% growth from June 2021, which makes it one of Africa’s leading music services. Its biggest user numbers are from Nigeria with a total of 4.9 million monthly users, followed by South Africa with 3.7 million, Kenya with 2.8 million and Tanzania with 2.4 million. In addition to the four, the company has a strong user base in Uganda, Ethiopia, Ghana, DRC, Zambia, Sudan, Cameroon, Angola, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Rwanda, Côte d’Ivoire, South Sudan and Malawi where it registers over 100 000 monthly streams

Between July 2021 to July 2022, Mdundo has grown its local catalogue by 43% to a total of 423 000 African songs directly uploaded to Mdundo.com. The fastest growing regions are Central Africa and Western Africa with 85% and 78% growth, respectively. Mdundo also recently announced a goal of 50 million monthly active users and a positive EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation) for the financial year ending June 2025.

Mdundo’s head of licensing, Wanjiku Koinange, said: “The commercial success of our service has created a massive opportunity for local and global rights holders to generate revenue from the growing lower and middle-class across Africa that is online on their phone. It’s a very exciting development and we’re experiencing an increase in interest from global rights owners to understand our business and monetisation strategy.

“As a result of our growing commercial success across our key markets, Mdundo has increased our payouts to rights holders significantly. The commercial success is also clearly illustrated in our rapid growth in payout per download, up by approximately 400% from the first half of 2021 to the first half of 2022,” added Koinange.

The company has also entered new licensing agreements with major global and African rights organisations including Universal Music Group and Fuga in addition to the partnerships with Warner Music Group and Believe Digital and leading African rights owners Mavin Records, Africori, emPawa, MAD, Slide Digital, Zeze Africa, Tamasha Records, CCA, Lynx Entertainment, Black Market Records and Kings Music.

Mdundo says it seeks to, and has invested heavily in driving value per user through premium products and telecommunication partnerships. MAD Solutions Group, one of Mdundo's close partners in Africa, acknowledged its business growth from the platform's payouts.  

MAD Solutions Group founder and CEO Bugwu Aneto-Okeke said: “We are experiencing great growth for our catalogue within the Mdundo service across the continent. It’s important for us to work with a local service that targets the mass market within the continent, ensuring that we are offering a solution as a record label for fans of African music. It’s exciting to see that African music fans are growing in commercial value to strengthen the financials within the African music industry further.”