Anghami, the music streaming service based in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, is preparing to go public via a spac merger in the US. Ahead of that, it has been profiled by the Rest of World website, including the latest figures on its growth.
Anghami now has more than 70 million registered users, and 1.4 million of them are paying for a subscription. Which may sound small by the standards of the big global DSPs, but in MENA streaming subscriptions are still nascent.
“We believe our biggest contribution to the industry so far has been educating consumers here about paying for content and the idea of subscription,” said co-founder Elie Habib in the interview. “When we started, some even thought it was a scam to charge every month.”
Anghami’s investor presentation, published in March, revealed that it had 15 million active users, and claimed a 58% share of MENA music subscribers. That presentation also noted that while Arabic music was 1% of Anghami’s catalogue, it accounted for around half of its total streams.
Another quote from the Rest of World article, from Universal Music Group’s EVP of digital strategy Michael Nash, is also worth thinking about. “We’re at a point right now where the top regional services are responsible for 25% of the global paid subscriber base,” he said, in a remark accompanied by a prediction from Midia Research that services in MENA, Asia Pacific, Latin America and Africa will account for 73% of global subscriber growth between 2020 and 2028.
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