Africa's Creative Tech Monetisation: Promising Models, Critical Questions

Sub-Saharan Africa's music industry recorded 22.6 per cent revenue growth in 2024, surpassing $100 million for the first time, according to IFPI data. Streaming revenues globally reached $20.4 billion, representing 69 per cent of worldwide music income. These figures paint a picture of explosive opportunity, and African founders are responding with AI-powered production tools and digital infrastructure platforms designed to help creators monetise content more efficiently.

Zellow's research team's analysis of these emerging models reveals both genuine innovation and significant unanswered questions about market size, platform economics, and whether the business models being deployed can capture sustainable value in African creative markets. The platforms attracting investment and attention today address real problems, but face execution challenges that determine whether solving those problems translates into viable businesses.

What the Regional Growth Data Actually Reveals

The IFPI regional breakdown shows Sub-Saharan Africa growing faster than most global markets at 22.6 per cent. Yet context fundamentally changes how we should interpret this performance.

First, Sub-Saharan Africa's total recorded music revenue of $110 million represents approximately 0.4 per cent of the roughly $28 billion global market. Despite impressive percentage growth, the continent remains commercially marginal to major international labels and platforms. This creates opportunity space for regional players unburdened by the infrastructure and cost structures that major labels require, but also severely limits the capital that global platforms invest in local market development.

Second, South Africa accounts for 74.6 percent of Sub-Saharan Africa's total revenue after growing 14.4 percent. This means the entire rest of the region—47 countries—generated approximately $28 million in recorded music revenue in 2024. For platforms attempting to build pan-African businesses, this concentration presents both challenge and opportunity. The addressable market outside South Africa is dramatically smaller than aggregate regional numbers suggest, but also less competitive and potentially underserved by existing solutions.

Third, comparing Sub-Saharan Africa to the Middle East and North Africa offers an instructive contrast. MENA grew at 22.8 percent, with streaming representing 99.5 percent of revenues, nearly pure digital monetization. Sub-Saharan Africa's streaming percentage isn't disclosed in available data, which likely indicates a more mixed revenue composition including physical sales, performance rights, and other non-platform revenue streams. This matters because platforms building digital monetisation infrastructure depend specifically on streaming and digital consumption, not the total music market size.

Strategic insight: Founders building creative monetisation platforms operate in a market where growth rates are strong, but the absolute market size remains constrained. Success requires capturing value efficiently rather than relying on market expansion alone to drive returns.

The AI Music Production Model: KorinAI's Democratic Access Approach

KorinAI represents one emerging approach to creative monetisation: AI-powered music generation that removes traditional barriers to production. Founded by Philip Olajide-Philips, who experienced firsthand the frustration of having a creative vision but lacking affordable studio access, the platform enables users to generate songs, enhance vocals, master audio, and distribute content to streaming services without traditional studio infrastructure.

The founder's narrative is compelling and addresses a genuine market gap. In 2014, despite studying Music Technology, Olajide-Philips couldn't afford the professional studios, producers, or equipment needed to produce his first album. This experience directly informs KorinAI's mission: democratizing music creation for Africa's predominantly young, creative population.

The Problem KorinAI Addresses Is Real

The barriers Olajide-Philips describes are well-documented across African creative markets. Studio session costs ranging from $50 to $500 per song place professional production out of reach for most aspiring creators. Producer relationships often depend on personal networks that exclude talented outsiders. Equipment requirements create upfront capital needs that few young creators can meet.

With over 60 percent of Africa's population under 25, the continent has enormous creative energy constrained by infrastructure gaps. KorinAI's approach, which is enabling creation through smartphones or laptops without studio access, directly targets this friction point. The platform has already enabled its founder to release two albums on streaming platforms, demonstrating the model's viability for at least one category of user.

The Multi-Sided Value Proposition

What makes KorinAI's approach strategically interesting is that it addresses multiple customer segments simultaneously, not just aspiring musicians. The platform serves:

Emerging artists who need affordable production to test whether their music finds audiences before committing to expensive studio time

Content creators (filmmakers, video producers, podcasters) who need original music for soundtracks, background scores, and intros without navigating complex licensing or paying for generic royalty-free music lacking local cultural flavour

Commercial users (marketers, brands) seeking jingles, anthems, or promotional music at a lower cost than commissioning traditional production

Experimental creators who want to explore new styles, create multilingual versions, or produce background music without full production investment

This multi-sided approach expands the addressable market beyond the narrow segment of "aspiring professional musicians" to include anyone needing original music for any purpose. It also potentially enables multiple revenue streams, including subscriptions for regular users, per-track pricing for occasional use, and commercial licensing for business applications.

The Critical Questions Platform Economics Must Answer

Despite the genuine problem KorinAI addresses and its thoughtful multi-sided positioning, several questions determine whether the business model achieves sustainable scale:

Customer acquisition and retention economics: How much does it cost to acquire each user category, and what's the lifetime value of each? Content creators might use the platform regularly (high LTV), while aspiring musicians might generate a few songs and disappear (low LTV). Understanding which segments drive sustainable economics versus one-time usage matters enormously.

The quality-authenticity balance: AI music generation works by learning from existing patterns. For KorinAI to help African creators succeed commercially—not just produce music—the output must achieve cultural authenticity that audiences and industry gatekeepers recognise as genuine. Whether AI systems can reliably reproduce the specific production choices, vocal inflexions, and sonic signatures that make Afrobeats, Amapiano, or other African genres commercially distinctive internationally remains to be proven at scale.

Monetization model sustainability: Does the platform charge subscriptions, per-track fees, or revenue shares from streaming? Each model has different implications for unit economics. Subscriptions work if usage is regular; per-track pricing works for occasional use but requires low acquisition costs; revenue sharing aligns platform success with creator success but depends on creators actually monetizing their AI-generated content.

The competitive timing question: Global AI music platforms like Suno and Udio operate with substantial venture backing. KorinAI's differentiation is its African market focus and cultural understanding. The strategic question is whether this focus creates enough time advantage to build user loyalty, network effects, or brand recognition before well-funded global competitors add African localisation.

Zellow's assessment: This window is probably 12 to 18 months, which means execution speed matters more than long-term technological defensibility.

What the Founder's Background Suggests About Execution

Olajide-Philips's direct experience with the problem KorinAI solves; he lived it, not just observed it. The platform provides crucial domain knowledge that purely technical founders might lack. He understands creative workflows, the psychological barriers creators face, and what "good enough" quality means in different contexts because he's navigated these challenges himself.

His ability to complete two albums using the model he's now scaling suggests the core value proposition works for at least some user segments. The question becomes whether his specific use case (songwriter with technical knowledge but limited budget) represents a large enough addressable market, or whether the platform must expand to serve users with different needs and expectations.

What's not yet visible from available information: user growth trajectories, retention rates, what percentage of users successfully monetize their AI-generated content on streaming platforms, and whether the economics work at scale. These operational metrics determine whether KorinAI transitions from solving a real problem to building a sustainable business.

The Production Infrastructure Model: Filmmaker Mart's Marketplace Approach

Filmmakers Mart (FMM) pursues a fundamentally different strategy: building marketplace infrastructure that connects filmmakers to production services, including location scouting, logistics, catering, permits, and vetted production teams. The platform has attracted backing from the International Finance Corporation (IFC's first investment in Nigeria's audiovisual industry) and participation from Sony Innovation Fund Africa.

The marketplace model's logic is straightforward: replace fragmented, relationship-based service sourcing with centralised, technology-enabled coordination that reduces transaction costs and improves efficiency. This addresses a different friction point than KorinAI: not production tool access, but the operational complexity of assembling reliable production resources across different locations.

Why Production Marketplaces Face Structural Challenges

Marketplace businesses must solve simultaneous supply and demand problems. Filmmakers won't use a platform without sufficient service providers, and service providers won't invest time in a platform without sufficient transaction volume. Breaking this cold start dynamic typically requires substantial subsidization: either discounted pricing to attract users or guaranteed volume to attract suppliers.

What makes production marketplaces particularly challenging is that many transactions naturally move off-platform after initial introductions. If a filmmaker finds a reliable location scout or crew through FMM, economic incentive pushes future transactions direct to avoid platform fees. Marketplaces must either provide ongoing value beyond initial matching (quality assurance, payment processing, insurance, dispute resolution) or implement contractual mechanisms preventing disintermediation.

Geographic fragmentation compounds these challenges. Production service markets are intensely local, considering the location scouts, crew members, and equipment providers who know Lagos thoroughly offer limited value for Nairobi productions. This means FMM must rebuild supply-side liquidity in each new market rather than benefiting from network effects that scale across geographies. Each market expansion essentially restarts the cold start problem.

The Unit Economics Question

Marketplace businesses typically need 15 to 30 per cent take rates (the percentage fee on transactions) to achieve profitability after accounting for platform operations, customer acquisition, and quality control costs. In creative production markets in which relationships matter, budgets are constrained, and many transactions happen through informal networks, commanding meaningful take rates without driving users to transact off-platform presents significant challenges.

Professional production teams have established reputations and direct client relationships. Convincing them to route transactions through a platform that takes a percentage requires either providing substantial additional value (deal flow they wouldn't otherwise access, payment guarantees, quality certification that enhances their market position) or regulatory/contractual mechanisms that prevent disintermediation. Building the former takes time and operational sophistication; implementing the latter faces resistance.

Critical information gap: FMM hasn't disclosed its take rate structure, whether it charges filmmakers or service providers (or both), gross merchandise value flowing through the platform, or transaction retention rates. Without this data, assessing whether the business model has achieved the unit economics that make marketplace businesses viable remains impossible from external analysis.

Why IFC Backing Signals Both Validation and Caution

IFC's investment—specifically noted as its first in Nigeria's audiovisual industry—provides important credibility and operational runway. Development finance institutions like IFC typically invest in sectors where market failures prevent private capital deployment due to perceived risk, long payback periods, or social impact priorities.

This backing validates that production infrastructure gaps represent genuine market failures worth addressing. But it also signals that the business may not yet demonstrate the commercial traction that attracts traditional venture capital at scale. IFC's patient capital and impact focus make it appropriate for businesses that serve important needs but face longer paths to profitability than typical VC-backed models.

Sony Innovation Fund's participation adds different value, which provides access to Sony's global creative network, content distribution expertise, and potential strategic interest in African content pipelines. This relationship could provide competitive advantages around content licensing, distribution partnerships, or technical infrastructure that purely financial investors can't offer.

What remains unclear: investment amounts, valuation, and whether these institutional backers have access to traction metrics that demonstrate the marketplace has achieved the liquidity and transaction retention that marketplace economics require. External analysis can't distinguish between "promising early-stage platform receiving patient capital to prove the model" and "platform with demonstrated product-market fit scaling proven unit economics."

The Framework: What Determines Creative Platform Success in African Markets

Based on patterns visible across creative monetisation platforms, five critical factors determine whether platforms can build sustainable, venture-scale businesses:

Factor One: Solving the Right Problem for a Large Enough Segment

Many platforms address real problems, but for segments too small or unwilling to pay enough to support venture economics. The critical test is whether the problem being solved is frequent enough, painful enough, and affects enough potential customers that the platform can acquire users cost-effectively and monetise them sustainably.

Evaluation approach: KorinAI solves production cost barriers for multiple segments (musicians, content creators, commercial users). The breadth potentially creates sufficient addressable market if each segment monetizes differently. FMM solves coordination complexity for filmmakers, but the segment is narrower, and transaction frequency may be lower (filmmakers produce projects episodically, not continuously).

Factor Two: Demonstrable Value Capture, Not Just Value Creation

Many platforms help users create better outcomes or access services more efficiently without successfully capturing a portion of that value as sustainable revenue. The critical distinction is whether the platform becomes integral enough to user workflows or economic success that paying platform fees feels worthwhile rather than extractive.

Evaluation approach: Does the platform charge for access to tools (KorinAI model), take a percentage of transactions (FMM model), or share revenue from downstream monetisation? Each has different implications. Tool access pricing works if users derive sufficient value to justify recurring payments. Transaction percentages work if the platform facilitates enough volume that suppliers and buyers prefer platform coordination despite fees. Revenue sharing aligns platform success with user success but requires deep integration into monetisation flows.

Factor Three: Defensible Differentiation Beyond First-Mover Advantage

Being first in a market creates temporary positioning but rarely constitutes a durable competitive advantage. Platforms must build network effects, proprietary data, brand loyalty, cultural understanding, or technical capabilities that make replication difficult even for well-funded competitors.

Evaluation approach: KorinAI's defensibility comes from cultural localisation and market focus, and understanding what "authentic" sounds like across African genres matters more than having the most sophisticated AI. This advantage is real but time-limited. FMM's defensibility comes from supply-side liquidity, in which once enough filmmakers and service providers default to the platform, new entrants face cold start challenges. This advantage strengthens over time if FMM executes well.

Factor Four: Realistic Market Size Given Capital Requirements

Venture-backed platforms require not just growth but growth into markets large enough to generate the absolute returns that make equity investment worthwhile. A platform capturing 20 per cent of a $28 million market generates very different outcomes than one capturing 2 per cent of a $2 billion market, even if both represent strong market share.

Evaluation approach: KorinAI's multi-sided positioning (musicians, content creators, commercial users) expands the addressable market beyond narrow music production to a broader "anyone needing original music for any purpose." This matters because it potentially unlocks markets adjacent to but larger than recorded music. FMM operates in film production services, where the total addressable market depends on film production volume across target countries. Understanding realistic transaction capture rates determines whether the absolute market size supports venture returns.

Factor Five: Team Capacity for Adaptive Execution

Creative businesses require balancing artistic sensibility with commercial discipline, managing relationships across fragmented supplier ecosystems, and navigating cultural contexts that vary dramatically across markets. Founder domain expertise, operational sophistication, and demonstrated learning velocity often matter more than initial business model elegance.

Evaluation approach: Olajide-Philips's direct experience with the problem KorinAI addresses provides domain knowledge that purely technical founders lack. His completion of two albums using the model suggests it works for at least his use case. The question is whether his specific experience translates to understanding the needs of other segments (content creators, commercial users). FMM's team background isn't detailed in available information, but marketplace operations require different competencies than creative production, in which supply quality control, fraud prevention, dispute resolution, and unit economics optimisation matter more than creative sensibilities.

What Success Actually Requires for Each Model

KorinAI's Path to Sustainable Scale

For AI music generation platforms, success requires proving several things rapidly:

Cultural authenticity at scale: Not just that individual users can generate acceptable music, but that AI-produced content achieves the specific cultural markers that make African music commercially successful. This means the platform must demonstrate that users are actually monetising their AI-generated content on streaming platforms, getting playlist placements, building audiences and not just creating music that sits unused.

Multi-segment retention: If the business model depends on serving musicians, content creators, and commercial users simultaneously, the platform must prove that each segment uses it regularly enough to justify acquisition costs. One-time users who generate a single song don't build sustainable businesses; regular users who integrate the platform into recurring workflows do.

Speed to market leadership: Given that global AI music platforms will add localization features, KorinAI must build brand recognition and user loyalty quickly enough that when well-funded competitors enter, existing users have reasons to stay beyond simple feature parity. This might come from community features, curated cultural training, or integration with local distribution and monetisation channels.

The founder's direct experience with the problem he's solving is an advantage, but the critical question is whether he can translate that personal understanding into product features and go-to-market strategies that work for segments with different needs. Musicians, filmmakers, and podcasters use music differently, discover tools through different channels, and evaluate quality differently.

FMM's Path to Marketplace Liquidity

For production infrastructure marketplaces, success requires:

Deep liquidity in core markets before geographic expansion: FMM must achieve sufficient transaction density in Lagos or Nairobi that both filmmakers and service providers default to the platform because going elsewhere means missing opportunities. This probably means becoming the coordination mechanism for 60+ per cent of commercial production in at least one market before expanding to the next.

Solving disintermediation through continuous value: Marketplaces face constant pressure from users who connect on-platform but transact off-platform to avoid fees. FMM must provide value beyond initial introductions—payment processing, insurance, quality guarantees, dispute resolution—that makes staying on-platform worth the fee percentage.

Unit economics that work at scale: The platform must prove it can operate profitably at the transaction volumes realistic in African film production markets. If the take rate required to cover costs pushes pricing above what filmmakers will pay, or the operational costs of quality control and user acquisition exceed what transaction fees generate, the model doesn't work regardless of how well it solves the coordination problem.

IFC and Sony's backing provide a runway to prove these things, but a runway isn't the same as proof. The critical metrics, including transaction volume, retention rate, take rate, and gross merchandise value, remain undisclosed, which means external observers can't assess whether FMM has achieved marketplace product-market fit or is still in the proof-of-concept phase.

The Broader Market Context: Understanding What's Actually Addressable

PwC projects that entertainment and media revenues across Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa will grow from $17.5 billion in 2022 to $27 billion by 2027. This figure appears frequently in market analyses as evidence of opportunity scale.

But platform economics depend on what portion of this revenue flows through channels that digital platforms can influence. Film box office receipts, television broadcast licensing, live event ticket sales, and physical media all contribute to "entertainment and media revenue" but don't necessarily flow through creator monetization platforms or production marketplaces.

What matters for platforms like KorinAI and FMM is the subset of revenue that:

• Comes from digital consumption or production that platforms can facilitate

• Flows to independent creators rather than established media companies

• Isn't already captured by global platforms (YouTube, Spotify, Netflix)

• Can be influenced by production tools or marketplace coordination

This addressable portion is substantially smaller than the $27 billion headline, though still potentially significant if platforms demonstrate they increase creator success rates or capture meaningful transaction percentages.

Zellow's assessment: The platforms most likely to succeed aren't necessarily those targeting the largest total markets, but those solving the most acute problems for segments willing to pay for solutions. KorinAI's multi-sided approach potentially addresses acute problems (production costs, licensing complexity, original music needs) for multiple segments. FMM addresses coordination complexity that filmmakers experience episodically rather than continuously, which creates different usage patterns and monetization challenges.

What Disclosed Traction Would Reveal

The most significant limitation in evaluating these platforms is how much critical operational information remains undisclosed:

For KorinAI:

• How many active users (musicians, content creators, and commercial) are across each segment?

• What percentage of users generate multiple tracks versus one-time usage?

• Are users successfully monetising AI-generated content on streaming platforms?

• What's the customer acquisition cost versus lifetime value ratio?

• What revenue model (subscriptions, per-track, commercial licensing) works best?

For FMM:

• How many active filmmakers and service providers?

• What's the monthly gross merchandise value?

• What transaction retention rate do users who connect on-platform continue transacting on-platform?

• How concentrated (few power users versus broad distribution) is the usage?

This absence of traction data makes distinguishing between platforms with genuine product-market fit and those still in early validation phases impossible from external analysis. Institutional backing provides credibility and runway, but doesn't substitute for operational metrics that demonstrate business model viability.

For founders building in this space and analysts attempting to assess sector development, what remains undisclosed matters more than what's publicly available. The difference between platforms that scale successfully and those that struggle often becomes visible in operational metrics long before it appears in public narratives.

Conclusion: Real Problems, Unproven Solutions

Both KorinAI and Filmmakers Mart address genuine friction points in African creative markets. Production costs and studio access genuinely constrain creators. Fragmented service sourcing genuinely increases coordination costs for filmmakers. The problems these platforms solve are real, not manufactured.

But solving real problems and building sustainable businesses are different challenges. Many platforms create value for users without successfully capturing enough of that value to support venture economics. Others achieve early traction in narrow segments without discovering paths to the scale that equity backing requires.

Zellow's assessment based on available information:

KorinAI's model has several structural advantages: It serves multiple customer segments, addresses recurring needs rather than episodic problems, and operates in a space where global competitors haven't yet localised effectively. The founder's direct experience with the problem creates domain knowledge advantages. The primary risks are proving cultural authenticity at scale, defending against well-funded global competitors once they localise, and demonstrating that users monetise AI-generated content successfully enough to justify platform fees.

FMM's model faces classic marketplace challenges: Cold start dynamics, geographic fragmentation, disintermediation pressure, and unit economics that depend on transaction volumes that may be difficult to achieve in episodic-use creative services. IFC and Sony backing provides validation and runway, but marketplace success requires achieving liquidity that makes the platform the default coordination mechanism, not just an option among several.

Both platforms deserve credit for tackling infrastructure gaps that constrain African creative industries. Whether they build sustainable businesses depends on execution factors that aren't yet visible in public information: user acquisition costs, retention rates, monetization conversion, and whether their specific value propositions create enough user stickiness to build defensible positions before competition intensifies.

Africa's creative monetisation opportunity is real, considering demographics, digital adoption, and growth rates support optimism. But opportunity and capture are different things. The platforms that succeed will be those that align their success tightly with user success, build defensibility beyond first-mover advantage, and prove unit economics work at the scale their addressable markets realistically support.

Until platforms disclose the traction metrics that demonstrate these things, external enthusiasm should be tempered with recognition of how much execution risk remains between solving real problems and building venture-scale businesses. Both KorinAI and FMM merit attention as serious attempts to address genuine gaps. Whether attention translates to sustainable success remains to be proven through operational performance, not just positioning and backing.