African culture is no longer local.
It travels across borders in real time, with music, film, fashion, and talent from across the continent shaping global markets and influencing how culture itself is produced and consumed.
What is far less clear, and far more important, is who actually owns the value that this culture creates.
African culture is created locally, but ownership is often determined by where the systems that structure, distribute, and monetize it are based. That gap is no longer theoretical. It is structural, and it is beginning to matter more than growth itself.
The scale of that value is no longer speculative. Recorded music revenues in Sub-Saharan Africa grew by over 22% in 2024, reaching roughly $110 million, up from under $100 million the year before. The growth is rapid, but the base remains small, with streaming driving most of that expansion and paying out tens of millions of dollars each year to artists from markets like Nigeria and South Africa.
While music provides a clear lens into how this value moves, the same dynamics apply across film, fashion, sports, design, and digital content, where cultural output is scaling faster than the systems that capture its value.
Demand is growing, but the distance between visibility and ownership is where value is decided. It is less about who creates, and more about who controls how it moves, how revenue is collected, and how rights are held over time. In practice, ownership sits with those who control rights, distribution systems, and capital, meaning that while creation may begin in Africa, control often does not.
A song can emerge from Lagos or Johannesburg and still depend on decisions made elsewhere to reach a global audience, shaping not just visibility but also pricing and leverage. Following the money makes the imbalance harder to ignore.
A globally successful Afrobeats record may be streamed hundreds of millions of times across Europe and North America, with platforms headquartered elsewhere and rights administered across multiple territories. By the time revenue is collected and distributed, only a portion returns to the originating market. The culture travels, but the system that supports it is anchored elsewhere, and that is where most of the value stays.
The chain of decisions begins long before revenue is collected. A track is recorded, but the underlying rights are split across composition and master ownership, each governed by separate agreements, and distribution is handled through platforms that determine how content is surfaced and consumed.
As streams accumulate across markets, revenue is calculated differently across territories, and what appears to be a revenue outcome is often a systems outcome. Ownership follows infrastructure rather than origin, and where those systems sit is where value ultimately accumulates. By the time earnings are distributed, the outcome reflects system efficiency as much as popularity.
Spotify reported that it paid out approximately $59 million to artists from Nigeria and South Africa combined in 2024. It is meaningful, but small when placed next to a global recorded music industry worth nearly $30 billion. The issue is not whether value exists, but how much of it is retained, and where it ultimately accumulates.
Ownership does not stay where creation happens. It follows the systems that structure, finance, and scale it, which means visibility without control is participation, not ownership. Content may begin locally, but as it moves through distribution, monetization, and capital layers, control shifts outward, leaving a system where a significant share of cultural creation originates in Africa, but less of the value is captured as it scales.
At the center of this is intellectual property, but it only functions as intended when the surrounding system is coordinated and reliable. The World Intellectual Property Organization has repeatedly pointed to weak documentation, fragmented ownership, and underdeveloped collective management systems across many African markets. Where rights are not consistently registered or systems lack coordination, revenue becomes harder to track, enforce, and distribute effectively.
The challenge, then, is not simply building new systems, but improving the efficiency and coordination of those that already exist while developing the structures required for long term value capture. In practice, this comes down to a few structural gaps that consistently determine how value is retained.
Rights must be documented at the point of creation, because without that foundation, value cannot be tracked, enforced, or fully captured. Contracts must reflect long term ownership, otherwise creators exchange future value for short term access, and collective management systems must be transparent and reliable if they are to be trusted and used. These are not incremental improvements. They are prerequisites for participation in a functioning global system.
Governments also have a role to play in treating intellectual property as a coordinated economic system rather than a collection of legal processes. Nigeria is already moving in this direction. In November 2025, the Federal Executive Council approved the National Intellectual Property Policy and Strategy, the country’s first unified framework for protecting and commercializing intellectual property.
As part of its implementation, governance structures have been established, including an Inter-Ministerial Steering Committee and an Inter-Agency Coordination Group, designed to align efforts across ministries, agencies, and the broader innovation ecosystem.
The opportunity now lies in consistent execution and coordination across these systems. Rights may still be registered in one place, enforced in another, and monetized across multiple channels, but as these systems become more coordinated in practice, they will be better positioned to support value creation at scale and retain more of that value within the market.
For that to happen, registration, ownership data, licensing, dispute resolution, and royalty collection need to function as a coordinated system, and their effectiveness ultimately depends on the capacity to operate them.
As talent scales, it often operates internationally to access more developed infrastructure and expertise. This is not simply a function of ambition, but of where the systems that support scale are most developed. Over time, this creates a secondary effect, where the more advanced layers of deal structuring, rights management, and commercial strategy begin to sit closer to where that talent is operating at scale.
Building a stronger local pipeline of executive and technical talent therefore becomes just as important as building the infrastructure itself, because without that layer, ownership may begin locally, but control increasingly shifts outward as both talent and operations move across markets. Until that changes, value will continue to move faster than the systems designed to retain it.
That shift also depends on who is positioned to hold those assets over time. Local labels, publishers, and independent rights companies need access to longer-term capital so they are not forced to exit early, and while pension funds, institutional investors, and private capital can play a role, that only works if structures exist to aggregate catalogs into investable assets.
Without that layer, rights continue to be sold too early, and the long-term value leaves with them. This remains an area that is still developing across much of Africa, where funding often stops at production rather than extending into ownership and scale.
There are, however, clear signs of what is possible. Mavin Records, one of Nigeria’s most successful labels, has attracted international investment, reflecting years of deliberate execution and careful catalog building that made the business investable at scale.
It shows that African music assets, when built and structured over time, can attract serious global capital, and signals a broader shift in how global investors are beginning to engage with locally developed platforms.
For these types of partnerships to be effective, they must be structured in a way that is genuinely mutually beneficial, where value is shared, incentives are aligned, and both risk and upside are distributed in a balanced way.
Too often, local operators carry a disproportionate share of the execution risk, while control and long-term value continue to accrue elsewhere. When structured well, these partnerships strengthen the ecosystem and build enduring capacity. When they are not, they can shift control without creating lasting value locally.
The question, then, is not whether global capital should participate, but how ownership is structured over time and when rights are monetized within their lifecycle. That comes down to how rights are negotiated, how long they are held, and who is able to aggregate and scale them into assets that endure.
The goal is to ensure that enough ownership remains anchored locally to build enduring value, develop institutional knowledge, and preserve the context that gives the culture its relevance. As foreign capital continues to participate in the ecosystem, its role should extend beyond funding to include knowledge transfer, capability building, and integration into global markets, strengthening local systems while ensuring that long-term value remains rooted in the originating market.
In practice, however, that outcome is not guaranteed. The gap is structural. Too often, rights are unclear, poorly documented, or fragmented too early, and when that happens, scale does not translate into control. The global success of “Jerusalema” illustrates this clearly. What became a worldwide phenomenon moved quickly across markets, platforms, and commercial uses, while the underlying rights structure struggled to keep pace.
As its reach expanded, questions around ownership, rights splits, and revenue distribution followed, not because visibility was lacking, but because the underlying rights had not been clearly defined at the same pace as the song’s growth. When that happens, success does not strengthen the system. It exposes where it breaks.
This challenge is not isolated. In several markets, collective management organizations have struggled with transparency and consistency, which makes revenue unpredictable and erodes trust. At the same time, digital consumption has grown faster than the infrastructure needed to monetize it effectively, and in some cases, royalty collection rates fall well below their potential. Even where rights exist, they are not always fully exercised.
A useful contrast can be seen in markets where these systems are more fully developed. South Korea’s cultural expansion was not driven by visibility alone, but by systems that retained control across the value chain. Its copyright society collected around €279 million in 2023, reflecting a system that is coordinated, enforceable, and aligned to retain value over time.
This dynamic extends beyond music and reflects how cultural economies operate more broadly. In sports, as in other cultural industries, value is shaped less by individual points of creation and more by how rights are coordinated across media, licensing, and distribution systems.
When these systems are aligned, value is retained and compounded over time. Rights are aggregated, packaged, and sold at scale, allowing those who control the system to shape access, pricing, and long-term value capture across markets. That is where the real leverage sits.
The same logic applies across film, music, and digital content. Where systems are fragmented, value disperses across multiple actors and geographies. Where they are structured and coordinated, value is retained and compounded over time, shifting the outcome from short-term visibility to long-term asset creation.
This distinction is critical. Cultural exports can generate attention, but without coordinated systems, that attention does not translate into assets that remain tied to the domestic economy. Africa is not constrained by creativity or demand. The constraint is ownership of the systems that convert that demand into enduring value.
The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) provides a pathway to address this at scale. Covering over 1.3 billion people, it creates the potential for mutual recognition of rights across markets, reduced friction in cross-border licensing, and shared standards for registration and royalty collection. Without that level of alignment, cultural content will continue to outpace the systems designed to monetize it. With it, fragmentation can give way to retention.
Until these layers begin to align, scale will continue to outpace ownership. Culture will keep moving, audiences will keep growing, and revenue will continue to expand, but the systems that determine how that value is captured will remain elsewhere.
Africa is not underperforming culturally. The gap lies in ownership of the systems that convert cultural output into long-term economic value.
African culture will continue to scale and shape global markets. But unless the systems that govern rights, capital, and distribution are built and anchored locally, the value it creates will continue to move faster than the structures designed to retain it.
The question is no longer whether African culture will grow. It already has. The question is who will own the systems that determine how that growth is valued.
Gbemisola Abudu is the Founder and Managing Principal of BMGA Advisory, where she advises corporations, investors, founders, and governments on high-stakes decisions related to market expansion, strategic positioning, and long-term value creation across Africa and global markets. Her work sits at the intersection of culture, capital, and systems, with a focus on how markets scale, how value is structured, and how long-term economic value is built and retained.
