MTN Nigeria announced a new push into the country’s music industry on Thursday, unveiling plans for a forthcoming digital platform designed to give artists access to audience data, clearer revenue reporting, merchandise and live-performance support. Funsho Finnih, speaking at the MTN Music Workshop titled 'Reverberation: The Blueprint for Africa’s Digital Audio Future' at the MTN Event Centre in Falomo, Lagos, framed the move as a deliberate re-entry into music with creators at the center.
Finnih admitted the company had misstepped in the past. "We didn’t perform poorly, but we made significant errors by not including the industry in our plans," he said, invoking lessons from earlier services such as Caller Tunes. He added: "The artist is our primary focus. Without them, our industry diminishes" and promised the new effort would raise standards: "We aim to elevate the Nigerian market to global standards in terms of monetisation, insights, and intelligence."
The policy shift comes with concrete promises. MTN said the platform would give musicians and their teams access to audience analytics, revenue transparency, merchandising channels, advertising potential and support for live events — features designed to turn plays into reliable income and business opportunities.
The scale of the problem MTN hopes to tackle surfaced repeatedly at the Falomo event. "This disparity poses a major hurdle for our industry that we are capable of overcoming," Bugwu Aneto-Okeke told the workshop, citing an industry benchmark: one million plays in Nigeria yields around US$300, compared with about US$5,000 in the United States. Karl Toriola amplified the stakes, saying: "Nigerian music is no longer just emerging; it’s a global phenomenon that shapes culture and commerce on a worldwide scale," and that "the future of music distribution would hinge on trust, transparency, and equitable partnerships."
MTN’s announcement was paired with a separate, ongoing commitment to media capacity-building. The MTN Media Innovation Programme, launched in 2022 for media practitioners in Nigeria, selected 25 participants for its 2026 cohort after thousands of applications; Nneka Ukachukwu is among those chosen. The programme runs six weeks of concentrated work spread across six months and is fully sponsored by MTN, part of the company’s stated effort to strengthen coverage and storytelling about the creative economy.
Context matters. MTN previously experimented with music-adjacent services like Caller Tunes and now says it has learned from those early missteps. A'isha Mumuni, who said she has been in the music industry since 2006, urged that MTN’s relaunch be judged on how it treats creators rather than consumers: "Having been in the music industry since 2006, we learned from our mistakes. In light of the explosion of Nigerian talent, we are eager to re-enter the space, but with a fresh approach focused on creators rather than just consumers." The workshop was hosted at the Falomo venue after MTN reshuffled other parts of its business — a move that follows wider corporate activity reported by the company recently, including the planned sale of its fintech arm and regulatory actions over service failures (see and
The tension is straightforward. MTN is promising tools and transparency that, if delivered, could help close a yawning payment gap for artists. But the company’s past failure to build with the industry, and the statistics on per-play earnings, create a credibility test: can a telecom that once left creators on the sidelines convince artists and managers that new systems will pay differently this time? Finnih’s repeated emphasis on artists and Toriola’s call for trust and equitable partnerships acknowledged that the technical features alone will not be enough.
For now the most consequential question is execution. MTN has laid out features and rhetoric; it has not yet supplied a public roadmap for rollout or independent verification of the revenue changes artists will see. If the company follows through, the platform and the journalists emerging from its sponsored Media Innovation Programme will offer a faster, clearer way to measure whether Nigeria’s global music influence finally buys artists pay closer to what the numbers show overseas.
