Photo Credit: Mdundo
Nairobi, Kenya-headquartered music streaming service Mdundo has announced that it boasts 21.5 million monthly active users (MAUs), over 30 percent of whom reside in Nigeria.
Nine-year-old Mdundo, which is looking to attract a total of 50 million MAUs by mid-2025, detailed the current size of its userbase in a newly published report. According to the concise analysis, Mdundo achieved 107 percent MAU growth from Q1 FY 2021 (the three months ending on September 30th) to crack the aforesaid 21.5 million MAUs during the same stretch in 2022.
Moreover, Nigeria (and its 6.5 million MAUs) was Mdundo’s largest market as of Q1 FY 2022, followed by Kenya, South Africa, and Tanzania, respectively. The African streaming service has forecasted 25 million MAUs for the current fiscal year (which will end in June of 2023) and is banking on being “EBITDA positive” by the end of the 2024-25 fiscal year.
Notwithstanding the latter objective, Mdundo (which signed a Universal Music licensing pact in July) has predicted that it’ll post EBITDA of negative 7.0 million Danish Krone (currently $913,790) to DKK 8.5 million ($1,109,544) during the present fiscal year, besides revenue of between DKK 13 million ($1,696,701) and DKK 16 million ($2,088,248). The most recently completed fiscal year delivered income of DKK 7.3 million ($952,629), Mdundo reiterated.
Predictably, given Mdundo’s sizable reported usership and relatively modest reported revenue, the majority of the platform’s listeners are accessing music via ad-supported accounts, higher-ups said.
“Mdundo’s audio-ad format reached a total of 33 million people with 47 million ad-plays within the quarter and the advertisers included breweries, soft drinks, FMCGs and betting companies,” execs elaborated.
But Mdundo Premium just recently launched in Ghana (population 31 million) as part of an agreement with the West African nation’s “leading telecommunication provider, MTN,” and is also available to telco customers in Nigeria and Tanzania.
Lastly, in terms of Mdundo’s noteworthy performance specifics, the platform identified a 43 percent jump (between June of 2021 and June of 2022) “in total songs that have been uploaded directly to Mdundo by African musicians and rightsholders.” With rightsholders having been paid a cumulative $1 million from Mdundo streams to date, higher-ups anticipate a “minimum” of “$1 million to be earned in the financial year 2022-23″ alone.
Mdundo isn’t the only Spotify competitor that intends to record material growth by 2025, for Deezer, which suffered a subscriber dip during H1 2022, is working to pull down €1 billion in revenue and break even in the same year.
Meanwhile, Tencent Music (which operates QQ Music, Kugo, and Kuwo in China) listed shares in Hong Kong last month, whereas Middle Eastern streaming platform Anghami unveiled a deal “to produce and release a special track and music video to mark the launch of the FIFA 23 video game in the region.”