Rahma Ahmed
By Ahmed Rahma
An album of a Nigerian artiste, who recently won his first Grammy award, Damini Ebunoluwa Ogulu, professionally known as Burna Boy, has been ranked as the most-streamed album in Africa on a music App, Spotify.
Burna Boy is one of the biggest and most successful African artistes who rose to prominence in 2012 after releasing Like to Party, the lead single from his debut studio album L.I.F.E in 2013.
In 2017, Burna Boy signed with Bad Habit/Atlantic Records in the United States and Warner Music Group internationally.
His third studio album Outside marked his major-label debut and in 2019, he won Best International Act at the 2019 BET Awards and was announced as an Apple Music Up Next artist.
His fourth studio album African Giant was released in July 2019 and won him Album of the Year at the 2019 All Africa Music Awards and was nominated for Best World Music Album at the 62nd Annual Grammy Awards.
Recently, the album titled Twice as Tall, released on August 14, 2020, emerged most-streamed with 64 million streams, outstripping Wizkid’s Made in Lagos, which came in second with 31 million streams.
According to data, Tiwa Savage’s album titled Celia has 15.1 million streams, putting her album in the third position, while Davido’s A Better Time was ranked seventh at 9.15 million streams.
In a report, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) had projected that Nigeria would be the world’s fastest-growing entertainment and media market (E&M) with a 12.1 per cent Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) over a five-year period (2017-2021).
The Nigerian streaming market packs a lot of exciting content in Nollywood, music, comedy skits, religion, among others.
The market has recently received a lot of attention from investors, including Spotify, which is projected to overtake Apple as the most popular streaming service in the world.
There are already incumbents like Netflix, Showmax, Red TV, BoomPlay, etc, that continue to expand their content portfolios.
Recently launched in Nigeria and valued at $50 billion, Spotify which requires users to have data to access the platform has over 345 million monthly active listeners.
ArisePlay, a Nigerian streaming platform that launched in 2020, also said last week it was concluding a $100-million seed funding deal from venture capitalists to push its streaming services around the world.
