Wizkid’s fourth studio album, Made in Lagos, was released last October and so far, the Afrobeats project has been an acclaimed success.
By March 30, 2021, officially five months after the release of the LP, the WizKid Team revealed that the album now had, as at that time garnered over 421,000,000 streams across major streaming platforms.
That figure is one of the biggest streaming figures we’ve ever seen in the Nigerian music industry, and it had so many people wondering how much exactly the Starboy might make from that number of streams.
The album was released during a global pandemic, and so there were no physical copies available. Also WizKid hasn’t been able to tour with the album.
Essentially what this means is that if he’s to make any money from the release of the album, it has to come from the mechanical royalties paid by streaming platforms.
Here’s a comprehensive breakdown of the estimate income WizKid will get from his 421M streams, based on pay-per-stream information gotten from various sources.
Different platforms pay different amount as royalties to artist, based on different metrics only known to them. But there’s an average range of payment we can work with here. Let’s analyse the major platforms.
YouTube
YouTube has two different payout schemes, one for videos and one for YouTube Music. For videos, YouTube pays a meagre average of $0.00069 per stream, while when it comes to YouTube Music, that pay can go as high as $0.006 or even more.
Wizkid, as at last month, had over 79,000,000 YouTube streams. About 33,000,000 is from music videos of songs like “Smile,” “No Stress” and the just released “Essence.” The other 46,000,000 will be for audio streams and YT Music.
Videos: $0.00069 x 33M = $22,770
Music: $0.0067 x 46M = 310, 960
Apple Music
Wizkid‘s highest streams have come from this platform. Apple Music also pays an average of $0.006 per stream. This means from the 124,190,000 streams Made in Lagos got on Apple Music, Wizkid can get up to $745,140.
Spotify
Wizkid remains the most streamed Nigerian artist on Spotify. Made in Lagos, as at last month, had over 78,060,000 streams on the platform. With an average pay of $0.032, WizKid will get an estimated $249,792 from the platform.
AudioMack
AudioMack is the most popular platform in Nigeria currently. According to some sources, they pay about $10 for every 5000 streams.
That is, MIL’s 123,100,000+ streams should bring WizKid nothing less than $246,200.
Boomplay
While there is no real info about how much Boomplay pays per stream, using AudioMack’s average pay to calculate, WizKid might get about $40,000 from Boomplay.
How Much In Total?
There are other platforms like Tidal and Pandora, but since we don’t have any information on them, we will leave them out for now.
Also, the streams we used in calculating is the one uploaded by Wizkid’s team at the end of March 2021. The streams have definitely increased since then.
Anyway, since that’s out of the way, adding everything together, Made in Lagos would’ve made an estimated amount of $1,614,862 in the first five months of the release.
Converted into Naira using the official N381 rate, this would mean WizKid’s Made In Lagos has made an estimated N615,262,422.
Calculating using the black market rate of N478, the estimated income of Made in Lagos would be about N771,904,036. This is nothing but madness!
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