As global music streaming grows, who’s listening to Africa? | STREAMED
STREAMED is a regular column covering the people, companies and ideas behind the new media economy, written by Corin Faife and published by Breaker.
In the last week of September, IFPI, an organization that represents the global music industry, released a report into how people listen to music around the world. Titled Music Listening 2019, the report takes a comprehensive look at the music consumption habits of citizens of 21 different countries, encompassing streaming and downloads (both legal and illegal) in addition to conventional radio.
For the survey, IFPI contacted a demographically representative sample of internet users aged 16–64 from around the world. They came from a handful of European countries (Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Netherlands, Poland, the UK and Sweden), some from North America (Canada, US), Latin America (Brazil, Argentina, Mexico), Asia (India, South Korea, China, Japan), Australasia (Australia, New Zealand), Russia, and South Africa. Together these 21 countries made up 93 percent of revenues from recorded music in 2018 according to the IFPI’s Global Music Report, released earlier in the year.
The report has many interesting findings: As Billboard highlighted, one significant conclusion was that older listeners (bracketed into the 35–64 age category) are the fastest growing demographic for music streaming, although younger listeners still stream more in absolute terms. Smart speakers are gaining traction, with 20 percent of global respondents having used one to listen to music in the past three months, rising to 34 percent of all respondents in the US. And even with the proliferation of dedicated music streaming services like Spotify, Tidal, etc., YouTube remained the most popular platform for music streaming, with 77 percent of respondents saying they used the site to listen to music.
Reading Music Listening 2019 — which carries the subtitle “A look at how recorded music is enjoyed around the world” — I was struck by the fact that just a single African country was included (South Africa), which also happens to be one of the wealthiest and most educated on the continent. Given that more than a third of the countries in the survey are European and roughly a quarter Asian, it seems a shame that Africa has just one national representative. What of music fans in Mali, Zimbabwe, Morocco, Kenya? What of the Somalian vinyl enthusiast, Nigerian Spotify streamer, or radio listener in Angola?
There are 1.2 billion people on the African continent, which puts it in the same demographic ballpark as India and China — both of which receive a dedicated “Country focus” page in the report. The issue, presumably, is that the survey was carried out online and internet penetration in Africa remains lower than the rest of the world, but it’s not a satisfactory excuse.
As the Council on Foreign Relations noted in a blog post from July, in a given month more people in Africa will access the internet than in Latin America, North America, or the Middle East. True, Africa lags behind in terms of internet users as a proportion of the population, but the absolute figures are on a par with other regions and shouldn’t be discounted.
There’s no discounting the growing cultural influence of African nations either. Within the continent, Nigeria is now emerging as a powerhouse not just economically but artistically: Nigerian music acts are now part of the global pop vocabulary, and major labels have begun to invest seriously in the Afrobeats genre; meanwhile, the Guardian ran a profile of the alternative pop scene in Lagos on the day before the IFPI’s report, which ignored Nigeria, was released.
Indisputably, music lovers around the world are listening to Africa. It’s unfortunate that in this case market researchers largely skipped over it, and not the kind of oversight that can easily be explained without suspecting a disappointing Eurocentric bias. But as internet access becomes more widespread, we’ll reach a point that African consumers can’t be ignored — and the way things are going it won’t be too far in the future.
There’s a chance for progressive companies to get ahead of the curve here, and take African audiences and opinions seriously; and we should all keep challenging failures to do so if we want to see a truly decentralized world.
