How Audiomack became an unlikely Spotify competitor

Kendrick Lamar. Drake. Lady Gaga. The charts of music streaming services pretty much all look the same these days, with familiar names dominating the top spots—except on up-and-coming Spotify competitor Audiomack.

The current No. 1 album on Audiomack belongs to Nigeria’s Seyi Vibez, whose hypnotic Afrobeats tracks have amassed around 1.8 billion plays on the platform. Vibez is one of many African and Caribbean artists who have found breakout success on the platform. Many of them consistently draw larger audiences on Audiomack than on Spotify or Apple Music, largely due to the platform’s strong presence in local markets.

“We are the most-used streaming service in a large swath of Africa,” says Audiomack cofounder Brian Zisook. “We’re No. 1 on iOS and Android in Nigeria and Ghana.” The company boasts 58 billion-plus songs streamed in Nigeria alone. Half of Audiomack’s audience of 40 million monthly listeners comes from the continent.

Audiomack’s rise in West Africa was initially unintentional, but it has since become a case study in the potential of emerging markets and how smaller music platforms can thrive alongside industry giants like Spotify and Apple Music.

From a mixtape hub to an Afrobeats force

When Zisook and Dave Macli founded Audiomack in New York in 2012, they just wanted to make it easier for local hip-hop DJs to distribute their mixtapes. At the time, many DJs relied on questionable file-sharing sites, creating a poor experience for fans. “Those websites were strewn with pop-up [ads] and malware,” Zisook recalls. “If you downloaded a mixtape, you had to worry that you were going to crash your family computer.”

Audiomack grew steadily in Western markets, but never really broke through against its much bigger competitors. All that changed seemingly overnight in 2019 when West African musicians and their fans began flocking to the service en masse. “We just took off,” Zisook says. “The growth was a hockey stick.”

To adapt, Macli and Zisook hired a local team in Nigeria, gaining valuable insights into their new market. “The mistake that so many in the industry made was to view Africa as a monolith,” Zisook says. “If you are in Tanzania or Liberia, nothing is going to offend you more than only being served Nigerian, Ghanaian, or South African songs.” 

Betting on Africa as a growth market for music streaming is savvy, believes MIDiA Research senior music industry analyst Tatiana Cirisano. “As Western markets reach saturation, most future streaming growth will come from Global South regions, of which Africa is an important part,” she argues. “It was smart for Audiomack to position itself as a key player here.”

Betting on Africa’s music boom

Cirisano cautions, however, that business models that work in the West may not easily translate to emerging markets. “African countries have a lower average revenue per user than countries like the U.S. and U.K.,” she says. “Even though Africa’s impact on global music culture and consumption continues to grow, its impact on global music revenue is not matching that growth.”

 “It’s very difficult to monetize music in Africa,” acknowledges Zisook. “You have a young audience that has limited or no disposable income, and a lack of access to credit and debit cards. They pay for things online using gift cards. So there’s no opportunity for consistent subscriptions. There’s a lot of churn. They have hard capped data plans, and they have unreliable or no Wi-Fi.”

Audiomack responded to this by striking bundling deals with local cellphone carriers. The company also integrated alternative revenue streams for musicians: Fans can become direct financial supporters of their favorite artists on the platform, and in exchange get badges and bragging rights. It’s a clever way for Audiomack to differentiate itself from the competition, Cirisano contends, noting, “The traditional streaming business doesn’t monetize fandom, or depth of engagement—it monetizes pure consumption.”

Thriving alongside giants like Spotify

Scaling a business works for streaming giants like Spotify, which recently reported its first full year of profitability. But it has been much more challenging for second-tier services like Tidal, which reportedly laid off 100 staffers last fall. Audiomack could provide a blueprint for these smaller services to compete with, and prosper alongside the big guys.

In addition to further growing its user base in Africa, Audiomack also courts expats across Western markets. “A lot of our growth in Canada, U.K., Germany, and France is diasporic,” Zisook says. “Ghanaians in Germany, Nigerians in France.” At the same time, the company is striking licensing agreements with major labels to gain access to more of their catalogs. This attracts Western listeners familiar with hip-hop while introducing them to Seyi Vibez and other Afrobeats stars.

That way, Audiomack can become a complementary service for Western audiences looking to dive deeper into different music genres. “The same folks who listen to Spotify at work might use Audiomack later in the day to more actively discover music, express their fandom, and access a catalog that is not available on mainstream streaming services,” Cirisano says.

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