Spotify has turned five in Nigeria and to mark the milestone, the streaming giant just dropped some numbers that are going to make every Nigerian music lover very proud.
The platform launched in Nigeria in February 2021, and the very first song a Nigerian user streamed was, interestingly, not an Afrobeats track. It was Shiga Lin‘s Cantopop ballad from Hong Kong, which Spotify described as “a fitting start for what the next five years would look like: borderless, discovery-driven listening.” Five years later, the data tells a story that is hard to argue with.
Nigerian users have created more than 25 million playlists since launch, and in 2025 alone they clocked more than 1.4 billion hours of listening time. The average Nigerian listener on the platform is just 26 years old, and listening has grown by over 163 percent year on year since 2021. The number of Nigerian artists on Spotify is also up 158 percent since launch, meaning more creators are reaching audiences at home and around the world than ever before.
Now to the part everyone wants to know. The five most streamed artists in Nigeria over the past five years are Asake, Wizkid, Seyi Vibez, Burna Boy, and Davido. Asake’s position at the top is backed by serious numbers. Spotify notes that he has four of the top ten most streamed songs in Nigeria over the five year period, with his track “Remember” sitting at number one.
Afrobeats is the genre driving most of this growth, scaling by a staggering 5,022 percent since 2021. But Nigerian listeners are not stopping there. Amapiano has grown by 10,330 percent, gospel and praise music by 5,499 percent, hip-hop and rap by 3,020 percent, and R&B by 2,602 percent. Perhaps the most telling figure of all is that streams of music in Nigerian indigenous languages grew by 554 percent in 2024 alone, which Spotify says shows “a deep connection to local-language storytelling.”
Podcasts are also finding a serious audience. Nigerians have streamed almost 60 million hours of podcast content since Spotify launched, confirming that the appetite for audio in Nigeria goes well beyond music.
Five years in, and Nigeria is one of the most passionate listening audiences on the platform.
