African music already travels globally. The rights underneath it do not travel nearly as easily.
A listener in London, Toronto or São Paulo can discover and stream the same Nigerian record as someone in Lagos. Spotify reports that artists, on average, receive more than half their royalties from outside their home country two years after debut. Afrobeats consumption on Spotify grew 349-fold between 2014 and 2025. These figures do not value African music rights, but they show how far the audience for African-origin music now extends beyond its home markets.
The relevant market is not simply the money spent on recorded music inside Africa.
IFPI reported $120 million of Sub-Saharan African recorded-music revenue in 2025. That measures the regional recorded-music market. It does not capture all the money generated around the world by African-origin repertoire. A Nigerian record streamed in London belongs in the economics of that record even though the consumption occurred outside Nigeria.
Global streaming has made African music easier to consume and its popularity easier to observe.
It has not necessarily made the resulting rights easy to buy.
Specialist music capital is already moving towards smaller transactions. The harder problem may be producing enough transaction-ready African music assets for that capital to buy.
A stream is several steps away from an investable asset
Start with what actually happens when someone presses play.
The streaming service does not simply pay “the artist”.
On the recording side, royalties are paid to the relevant rightsholder, typically a label or distributor. Publishing royalties travel through a separate chain that can involve publishers, performing-rights organisations and mechanical agencies. Those rightsholders and intermediaries then account to artists, songwriters, producers and other participants according to their respective contracts.
For an investor, the chain looks more like this:
Global consumption
→ rightsholder revenue
→ recurring net owner share (NOS)
→ transferable NOS
→ acquirable asset.
Each step can reduce either the amount of cash flow available to the seller or the seller’s ability to transfer it.
Take a purely illustrative record generating $500,000 a year for its recording rightsholder.
That does not mean the artist owns a $500,000 annual cash flow.
The artist may have a 25% economic participation. An advance may still be recouping. A distributor may take a contractual share. A producer may have points. Different releases may sit under different contracts. Rights may differ by territory. Someone else’s consent may be required before an interest can be assigned.
An investor therefore needs to establish who receives the money, how much ultimately belongs to the proposed seller, what contractual deductions sit ahead of them, what exactly they own and whether they can sell it.
Streaming data can show that money is being generated. It cannot, by itself, tell you who owns the cash flow you want to buy.
Follow the buyer’s money backwards
A simple way to see the problem is to start with the size of the transaction rather than the popularity of the artist.
Suppose, purely for illustration, a buyer values sustainable annual NOS at ten times annual cash flow.
A $1 million acquisition requires $100,000 of sustainable annual NOS.
A $5 million acquisition requires $500,000.
A $10 million acquisition requires $1 million.
Now introduce actual owner participation.
If the proposed seller receives 50% of the relevant rightsholder economics, the underlying repertoire needs to generate twice the cash flow required by the buyer.
At 25% participation, it needs four times as much.
Headline streaming numbers can therefore become misleading surprisingly quickly in catalogue discussions.
The buyer is acquiring the sustainable cash flow attached to the particular economic interest being sold. Monthly listeners, cultural relevance and gross platform revenue can help explain where that cash flow comes from, but none is the asset being priced.
Capital is already moving towards smaller deals
One explanation for limited African catalogue activity has been that international music investors require assets that are simply too large.
Current evidence makes that explanation increasingly difficult to sustain on its own.
Duetti says it can work with creators where a track generates at least $2,000 annually from music rights. Its H2 2026 Music Finance Index reports that industry respondents expected the strongest deal-activity momentum in catalogues below $5 million, with the $1 million-to-$5 million category recording the strongest net-positive reading at +54%.
Duetti’s evidence is international rather than Africa-specific. Even so, transaction size alone becomes a weaker explanation for the limited African catalogue activity we can observe.
If specialist capital is prepared to transact smaller music assets, can it find African-origin rights, establish what the seller owns, verify the historical cash flow, price the risks and complete the transaction at a cost that still makes economic sense?
Once cheque size stops explaining the gap, sourcing, diligence, documentation and collection costs become much harder to ignore.
At the top, valuable rights may already be spoken for
The largest African music businesses illustrate one side of the problem.
In 2024, Universal Music Group announced the widely reported majority investment in Mavin Global, with TPG exiting and Kupanda Capital remaining a minority investor.
There is no need to infer from that transaction precisely which individual rights sit where. Some economically significant African-origin repertoire already sits inside labels, strategic investments, distribution arrangements, licences and other corporate structures. Valuable music therefore does not automatically constitute independent catalogue supply available to a financial buyer.
Public transaction evidence points in the same direction. Afrobeats Wire’s independently verified register contains 21 African-linked music transactions between May 2018 and June 2026. Fourteen were classified as corporate-equity transactions. Only two were identified transfers of specific master or publishing catalogues. The dataset is not exhaustive, but within the verified public record, company-level transactions are far more visible than catalogue sales.
Artist names are also poor proxies for acquisition architecture.
One artist’s economics can sit across an artist-owned company, a label, a distributor, a publisher and territorial licences, with different arrangements applying to different releases.
At the top end, finding valuable music may be easier than finding a clean economic interest in that music that is actually available to buy.
At the bottom, transaction costs start eating the asset
The opposite problem appears with smaller rights interests.
International buyers may be willing to finance them. Someone still has to review the contracts, verify title, reconcile royalty statements, investigate recoupment, understand tax treatment, document the assignment and redirect future payments.
Much of that work costs money whether the rights are worth $60,000 or $6 million.
Consider an illustrative model from research undertaken by my firm, PMEA.
Assume an acquisition at six times sustainable annual NOS, $15,000 of fixed legal and diligence costs, and a 3% origination cost.
A rights interest producing $10,000 of annual NOS would be acquired for $60,000.
Under those assumptions, immediate transaction friction would be approximately $16,800, or 28% of the purchase price, before SPV and ongoing portfolio-administration costs.
Increase annual NOS to $50,000 and the same model produces immediate friction of approximately 8%.
These are illustrative assumptions, not observed African transaction costs. Actual acquisition multiples and execution costs remain an empirical data gap.
Smaller assets can be perfectly financeable and still be expensive to transact one by one.
That creates a possible middle.
The missing middle is an execution hypothesis
Suppose a rights owner has $50,000 of sustainable annual NOS.
At an illustrative six-times multiple, that represents a $300,000 acquisition.
That is meaningful money to the owner. It may still be an inefficient transaction for a large buyer to discover, diligence, document and administer on a bespoke basis.
Now suppose 25 comparable interests can be originated.
Together, they produce $1.25 million of annual NOS.
At an illustrative eight-times valuation, that pool would be worth $10 million.
Nothing about the songs changed.
The capital format did.
The arithmetic does not establish the size of the market.
We do not currently have public evidence showing that Africa contains a sufficiently large population of rights owners producing $50,000 of clean, sustainable and transferable annual NOS. The PMEA research does not establish that distribution either.
The “missing middle” is an execution hypothesis, not a market-size estimate.
If fragmented but economically meaningful royalty interests exist in sufficient numbers, their institutional relevance may depend less on making each asset larger and more on making the process of finding and transacting them cheaper.
Nigeria’s distribution market offers a possible route into that problem.
The money may be easier to find than the rights
TurnTable’s H1 2026 data put EMPIRE at 11.30% of Nigerian streaming market share, followed by Virgin at 5.24%, Warner Music Group at 4.52% and UMG at 4.22%.
The leading Nigerian-owned company, Dapper Music & Entertainment, had 3.82%, followed by a longer tail including YBNL, GIRAN Republic, Starboy, Dangbana and NSNV.
Those numbers require a careful denominator.
They measure Nigerian streaming consumption. They are not worldwide revenue from Nigerian repertoire. And being the distributor associated with a stream does not prove ownership of the underlying copyright.
The underlying rights can be fragmented among many owners while parts of the distribution and payment infrastructure are considerably more concentrated.
A distributor or royalty-accounting intermediary may therefore be able to observe something an outside investor cannot easily see: who is receiving money, for which repertoire, against which identifiers, how much they are receiving and how consistently those payments have arrived.
However, payment history does not prove copyright title. It also does not tell you whether another party’s consent is required. And if does not establish that the recipient can assign the interest.
But it can tell you where to look.
Distribution and royalty-accounting infrastructure could therefore become an origination layer for a market whose underlying ownership remains fragmented.
There are two ways to aggregate music rights
The obvious version is asset aggregation.
Raise capital. Buy multiple master, publishing or royalty interests. Put them into a vehicle. Pool the cash flows.
That can create diversification and an asset large enough for institutional refinancing or eventual sale. It also means the aggregator needs capital to warehouse assets and bears the risks of deployment, timing, title and portfolio assembly.
The second model is origination aggregation.
Instead of starting by aggregating ownership, aggregate the machinery required to execute transactions: rights-owner discovery, royalty-statement verification, rights and contract diligence, repeatable underwriting, standardised documentation, payment and collection mechanics, portfolio reporting and access to capital.
A capital provider can then finance or acquire qualifying interests directly or through programme vehicles.
That model potentially requires less balance-sheet capital.
Its advantage could also compound differently. Each transaction can improve the originator’s knowledge of where rights sit, how particular contracts behave, which payment histories are reliable, what sellers expect and what buyers will finance.
Over time, that transaction infrastructure could itself acquire strategic value.
The model still has to survive contact with actual transactions.
Suitable sellers may not exist at sufficient scale. Seller price expectations may leave too little room for buyers. Title and diligence costs may prove substantially higher than assumed. Distributor-enabled origination only works if the relevant intermediaries can participate legally and commercially.
Executed or seriously diligenced transactions should answer those questions better than any top-down estimate of the African music market.
The audience has already been aggregated
Streaming put listeners in Lagos, London and Los Angeles within reach of the same record.
The financial architecture underneath that record remains considerably more fragmented.
Ownership can sit across several parties. Payments can travel through several intermediaries. Contracts can change by territory or release. The person receiving royalties may own only part of the economics, and what they own may not all be transferable.
The audience for African music has already been aggregated globally.
The rights, information and transaction infrastructure have not.
As international music capital moves towards smaller transactions, building another pool of money may therefore be less interesting than building the machinery that tells existing capital what it can safely buy.
That may be where the African catalogue opportunity actually begins.
This essay draws on a longer PMEA research paper, African Music Rights: The Catalogue Aggregation Opportunity, examining the economics and transaction architecture behind this thesis.