Afrobeats Became a Global Business. What Happened to Its Relationship With African Film?
Filmmaker Dami Twitch put it plainly on the Afropolitan podcast earlier this year.
“Nollywood producers can’t freely use Afrobeats songs in movies anymore. Even if the artist is my friend, they can’t give me permission to use their song freely because they have already entered a contract.”
He described the current relationship between Nigeria’s two most commercially powerful cultural industries as being “at a very weird place.”
That phrase is doing a lot of work.
Because what Dami Twitch is describing is not a breakdown between friends. It is the collision between two industries that globalised at different speeds, through different mechanisms, and are now discovering that success in global markets can create friction at home.
The Soundtrack Problem Is an IP Problem
Most people who read about this story framed it as a cost problem.
Afrobeats songs are expensive to license. Nollywood producers cannot afford them. Only big studios with investors behind them can pay.
That framing is accurate as far as it goes.
But it misses what is actually happening underneath the cost.
When a Nigerian filmmaker wants to use a popular Afrobeats song in a film, asking the artist is not enough. In most cases it has not been enough for years. Using a commercially released song in a film legally requires two separate licences.
The first is a synchronisation licence, which covers the right to use the underlying composition, the melody and the lyrics, in a visual work.
The second is a master recording licence, which covers the right to use the specific sound recording.
These two rights can sit with completely different parties. The composition rights may be administered by a publishing company. The master recording rights may sit with a label or a distributor. And both may now be controlled by companies headquartered outside Nigeria, under contracts that were signed in exchange for global distribution, advance payments, and royalty collection infrastructure that individual artists could not build themselves.
So when Dami Twitch says an artist cannot give permission even if they want to, he is describing something precise. The artist may genuinely want to say yes. But they no longer control the rights that permission would need to cover.
That is not a relationship problem. It is an infrastructure problem.
What Afrobeats’ Globalisation Actually Transferred
Three foreign companies controlled 68% of Nigeria’s total music streaming volume in 2025.
Empire led with 1.2 billion streams. Universal Music Group followed with 786.4 million. Sony Music ranked third with 541.8 million. Together, three companies headquartered in the United States and Japan administered two thirds of the streaming activity generated by Nigeria’s music industry.
This did not happen by accident or by force.
It happened because Nigerian artists made rational decisions. Publishing deals with foreign companies provide capital, global distribution, royalty collection infrastructure, and the administrative apparatus to monetise music in markets that African collecting societies have historically struggled to reach. Burna Boy signed a music publishing deal with Universal Music Group, estimated at $1 million, in 2018, and a royalty collection deal with Kobalt Neighbouring Rights in 2021. Wizkid signed a multi-album worldwide deal with RCA Records and Sony Music International in 2017. Davido signed with Columbia Records under Sony. Tems signed with RCA. CKay with Warner France. Tiwa Savage with Universal.
The entire A-list of Afrobeats is now administered through foreign rights infrastructure.
UMG’s majority acquisition of Mavin Global, Don Jazzy’s label, valued at an estimated $150 to $200 million, extended that foreign administrative control to Rema, Ayra Starr, Ladipoe, and Crayon’s publishing and recording rights in one transaction.
All of these deals made commercial sense for the artists. Publishing agreements turned catalogues into globally monetisable assets. International distribution made Nigerian music available on every streaming platform in every market. Royalty collection infrastructure recovered money from markets that Nigerian collecting societies would never have reached.
The deals were good for artists.
They were not designed with Nollywood filmmakers in mind.
The Collision
Here is the specific irony that Dami Twitch is pointing at.
Afrobeats becoming internationally valuable is obviously beneficial. The deals that sent Nigerian music global also increased the transaction costs for the Nigerian film industry that wants to use that music domestically.
A Nollywood producer who could once clear a song through a phone call to an artist now navigates a formal licensing process involving a foreign publisher, potentially a foreign label, two separate licence categories, legal review, and fees benchmarked to international sync markets rather than Nigerian production budgets.
The song is the same. The filmmaker is in Lagos. The artist is Nigerian. The film will be seen primarily by African audiences.
But the rights sit in New York, Los Angeles, or London.
And the price reflects where the rights sit, not where the film will be watched.
Independent filmmakers, who make up the majority of Nollywood’s production output, cannot absorb those costs. Only productions backed by major studios or well-resourced investors can realistically clear popular Afrobeats tracks. Which means the music most culturally resonant with Nigerian audiences is becoming financially inaccessible to most of the people making films for those audiences.
“So that collaboration for now is at a very weird place,” Dami Twitch said. “Not until a big studio comes to support your film, you might be able to afford these songs.”
What African Film Has Always Done With Music
This is not a minor aesthetic inconvenience.
Music in African cinema is not background texture. It is cultural location.
From the earliest modern African films, the Senegalese cinema of the 1960s, the Yoruba travelling theatre films of the 1970s, the home video boom of 1990s Nollywood, music has been how African films establish where they are, who they are about, and what emotional register they are operating in. OkayAfrica’s investigation into Africa’s film scoring ecosystem found that the continent’s film music history runs from indigenous instruments and chants to synthesised keyboard loops and locally produced percussion layered directly onto scenes. The soundtrack has always done the work of cultural anchoring.
When popular commercial music becomes financially inaccessible, filmmakers face a set of choices that all carry costs.
Commission original scores, which require a budget for composers and session musicians that independent productions often do not have. Use emerging artists whose music has not crossed into the rights-administration complexity of major label deals, which may mean sacrificing cultural recognition for affordability. Negotiate catalogue deals that cover older, cheaper music rather than current hits. Rely on production libraries. Use fewer recognisable songs, which changes what the film can communicate to its audience.
None of these options are straightforwardly bad. Some of them, particularly commissioning original scores, are practices that well-resourced film industries invest in deeply. But the constraint is arriving from the wrong direction. These choices are being forced by licensing costs rather than chosen from creative ambition.
The African Rights Infrastructure Gap
The real question underneath all of this is not whether Nigerian artists should sign with Sony, Warner, or Universal.
They should, if those deals serve their interests. And for global distribution, royalty collection, and advance capital, they often do.
The question is whether Africa is building enough of its own rights infrastructure around increasingly valuable intellectual property.
Africa has more than 32 collecting management organisations affiliated with CISAC, the global network of authors’ societies. Total African CMO collections reached €90 million in 2025. That is 0.7% of global collections.
The gap between the cultural output African creative industries generate and the royalty infrastructure that actually captures value from that output is enormous. South Africa’s SAMRO recently distributed R22 million in previously unclaimed royalties simply by updating members’ banking details. That figure illustrates how much revenue sits trapped in process failures rather than fundamental market absence.
On the sync side specifically, the infrastructure gap is both a lost-income problem for African creators and a market-access problem for African filmmakers.
SyncAll, launched in 2025, is an African-built platform aggregating rights-cleared catalogues and connecting them to sync buyers. Seven Seas Music has issued open calls for African music for film, television, and advertising placements globally. Downtown Music Publishing Africa has published a sync readiness guide specifically for African catalogues.
These are signals that the infrastructure is being built.
But building a pan-African sync licensing market, one where a Ghanaian film can efficiently clear a Nigerian song, or a Kenyan series can license a South African catalogue, or a Nigerian filmmaker can find rights-cleared emerging Afrobeats artists without navigating foreign publisher contracts, requires collecting societies, rights management systems, and licensing platforms that do not yet exist at the scale the market needs.
The Productive Tension
The problem Dami Twitch is describing is, at one level, a sign that Afrobeats has grown up.
Industries that are not commercially significant do not have IP disputes. Rights are only valuable when there is money attached to them. The fact that an Afrobeats song now requires formal licensing clearance from a foreign publisher is evidence that the music is worth enough globally to attract that level of administration.
That is a success story.
The unresolved part is that the same globalisation that made Afrobeats worth licensing is making it harder for African creative industries to use each other’s work.
Music publishing is increasingly treated as a rights-management business. That means licensing music for film, television, games, and advertising is increasingly a commercial transaction rather than a creative relationship. And the companies administering those transactions are, for the most part, not African.
The Financial Times has argued that Africa’s film sector has substantial economic potential but needs stronger cross-border collaboration and distribution infrastructure to capture more of that value. The same argument applies to rights infrastructure.
Building that infrastructure is not a simple task. But the collision Dami Twitch is describing is what the absence of it looks like in practice.
Nigeria’s music industry and its film industry are two of the continent’s most globally recognised creative exports. They have historically worked together to produce some of their most culturally resonant output.
The question now is whether the IP infrastructure that grew up to serve the global ambitions of African music can develop fast enough to also serve the African industries that want to use that music at home.
Written by Layo
Lead Editorial Writer, Creative Brief Africa
Outside of her editorial work, she writes Curious Health, a newsletter focused on everyday health questions, explored with clarity and care.