South African artists earned R504 million (about $30.69m) on Spotify in 2025, up 28% year on year and nearly double what they pulled in 2023. That is the number Spotify wanted in the headlines when it opened its Rosebank office numbers to the press on 8 May. The number it buried in the same release is the one that actually tells you who owns the sound: 74% of that money came from listeners outside South Africa.
Read that again. Almost three quarters of the royalties on the world's biggest amapiano export are paid by people who have never set foot in a Pretoria backyard session. The genre is no longer a domestic culture with an overseas fanbase. It is an export economy, and like most export economies built in the Global South, the demand, the platform, and increasingly the rights sit somewhere else.
Who is actually paying for amapiano?
Not Johannesburg. Spotify calls the rest of the world South African music's biggest market now, and the data backs it: SA artists were discovered by first-time listeners more than 1.6 billion times in 2025, a 40% jump, and roughly 3,550 of them landed on editorial playlists. Zulu-language music alone saw global royalties rise 37% year on year. The most-streamed local acts are the amapiano core: Kabza De Small, Kelvin Momo, DJ Maphorisa.
The optimistic read, the one Spotify leans on, is that demand is global and the door is open. "Their success is driven by worldwide demand, ensuring that independent and local talent alike are being discovered by billions of listeners," said Joceleyne Muhutu-Remy, the platform's Sub-Saharan Africa managing director. More than half the royalties did flow to independent artists and labels rather than majors, which is real and worth saying out loud.
So why does an export boom feel like a warning?
Because an export economy is only as good as how much of the money round-trips home, and streaming is built to make sure most of it doesn't. The platform takes its cut at the source. The publishing, the sample-pack licensing, the sync deals, the management infrastructure that turns a viral log-drum into a catalogue: those are increasingly booked in London, New York, and now Seoul. When 74% of your demand is offshore, your leverage is offshore too, and the people best placed to capitalise are the ones who already own distribution.
A sound can top the world and still leave its makers renting space in the house they built.
The R504m is a genuine win for the artists who got paid. It is also a balance-of-trade chart, and right now the trade flows one way.
What would ownership actually look like?
It looks like South African catalogues administered by South African publishers, sample packs that pay the originators of the sound rather than a marketplace in California, and management companies that keep the long tail at home instead of licensing it out. None of that is in the Loud & Clear report, because none of that is Spotify's job to fix. It is the home industry's. The export number is the receipt. The question is who gets to keep it.
