Kenyan-Based & Pan-African Music Service Mdundo Crosses 20M+ Monthly Active Users (MAUS) In June 2022.

Earlier today I received a press release that Mdundo, the music service that started in Kenya and is used by millions of consumers across Africa and globally has achieved the impressive milestone of over 20 million monthly active users or MAUs. These are seriously impressive subscriber numbers within an almost exclusively African context given that there are many Pan-African and global music streaming services like Spotify and BoomPlay that Mdundo is going to head-to-head with at the minute.

Mdundo crossed the 20.3 million MAUs number in June 2022 beating their expected target of 19 - 20 million for the month, representing a growth of 74% compared to June 2021. This suggests that Mdundo's growth is actually accelerating at a fairly impressive clip and all indications suggest that their unique business model is working for the African market. Unlike the majority of well-known music streaming services like Apple Music and Spotify that have freemium, ad-supported, and paid subscription revenue models, Mdundo works by letting users download music for free in exchange for listening to short audio-based ads before they play.

Nigeria remains the biggest market in Africa for Mdundo with a total of 4.9M MAUs, followed by South Africa with 3.7M MAUs, Kenya with 2.8M MAUs, and Tanzania with 2.4M MAUs. Ultimately, Mdundo as a music business aims to provide users in Africa and beyond with easy and legal access to online entertainment by delivering locally relevant content, formats, and channels while driving value per user through premium products and telecommunication partnerships from a commercial standpoint. Going forward, Mdundo aims to have 50M MAUs by the financial year ending June 2025.

Some of the things that stand out for me where Mdundo is concerned is that their music service works across mobile and desktop, as well as not requiring you to have an account to access some of their content. You can also download or stream their content which makes it more versatile for consumers so that if bandwidth is a challenge due to high costs and availability, you can simply download the MP3 files, which also happen to be quite small as they are compressed. Lastly, you don't even need a mobile app so basic feature phones can equally use the service as well as smartphones. These are important nuances that make Mdundo ideal for the African consumer and market in general.