A Streaming App Started Publishing Per-Stream Payouts. Artists Say the Numbers Are Worse Than They Feared.

Mzuka, a Lagos-based music streaming service with about 2.4 million paying subscribers, published a document last week tracing exactly where a ₦1,500 monthly subscription goes: payment processing, licensing to rights holders, distribution fees, platform costs, and finally the artist.

The headline figure is that an independent artist distributing through the most common aggregator receives approximately ₦0.19 per stream, and an artist signed to a label with a standard rate receives ₦0.07 before recoupment. Both numbers are lower than the estimates circulating among Nigerian artists, which had clustered around ₦0.40.

"We did not publish this because we come out of it well," said Mzuka co-founder Emeka Obi. "We come out of it as one of five parties taking a cut. But every argument about streaming in this country has been conducted with invented numbers, and we are the only party in the chain that can end that by publishing ours."

The reaction has been split between artists who see the disclosure as accountability and those who see it as a platform redirecting blame toward labels and aggregators. Both readings are defensible. What has changed is that the next negotiation between a Nigerian artist and a distributor will start from a published number — which is a materially different conversation than the one that has been happening.