Deal sheet
- Status
- Live. Launched at the end of Q4 FY2025/26; 2,402 orders placed in Q1 FY2026/27.
- Type
- Licensing
- Parties
- Mdundo, Mdundo.com A/S, Mdundo Limited (Kenya)
- Amount
- Not disclosed
- Rights covered
- No copyright transferred. Promotional placement on the Mdundo music service, sold by Mdundo to the rightsholders whose recordings it licenses, with settlement permitted against the royalty balance Mdundo holds to the artist account.
- Territory
- Not stated for this product. Mdundo operates a music service across African markets with a stated diaspora focus; the quarterly statement does not say in which markets Creator Promotions is sold.
- Announced
- 2026-10-20
- Primary document
- Regulatory filing
- Sources
- Mdundo.com A/S, company announcement 17-2026, Q1 FY2026/27 quarterly statement, Nasdaq First North Growth Market Denmark, 20 October 2026 · Q1 FY2026/27 quarterly statement (PDF attachment carrying the royalty balance wording), 20 October 2026 · Mdundo.com A/S annual report FY2025/26, company announcement 15-2026, 28 September 2026 · Annual report FY2025/26 (PDF), audited by EY Godkendt Revisionspartnerselskab, signed 28 September 2026 · Mdundo.com A/S H1 FY2025/26 report, 5 February 2026, disclosing the updated rights holder terms and conditions · Mdundo artist-facing site, "How Mdundo Calculates and Pays Your Royalties", dated 15 July 2025, stating the 50 per cent revenue share
Read this before citing: Could not be established from any document checked: the price per Creator Promotions order; Creator Promotions revenue for Q1 FY2026/27; the proportion of the 2,402 orders settled out of royalty balances rather than by mobile money; the split of the FY2025/26 combined DKK 0.1m line between artist promotion and music games; whether the 50 per cent artist revenue share published on Mdundo's artist-facing site in July 2025 survived the January 2026 variation of rights holder terms; the old and new rights holder rates; how many rights holder accounts the variation affected or whether those rights holders consented; the total Mdundo distributed in royalties in FY2025/26; whether the reversed prior-year provisions were sums previously owed to rights holders; what share of the DKK 9,003,491 of trade payables on the FY2025/26 balance sheet is owed to rights holders. No published terms page for Creator Promotions was found on mdundo.com or on www.mdundoforartists.com. Mdundo was not asked for comment before filing.
What changed hands: No copyright moved. Mdundo.com A/S, the Danish-registered, Nairobi-run music service, began selling promotional campaigns to the artists whose recordings it carries, and will accept payment for them out of the royalty balance it holds to an artist’s account. The arrangement is branded Creator Promotions and was called artist promotion in the audited accounts. It launched at the end of the quarter to 30 June 2026 and generated 2,402 orders in the quarter to 30 September 2026. The royalty balance payment route is disclosed for the first time in the quarterly statement filed on 20 October 2026. No price per order is disclosed, no revenue figure for the quarter is disclosed, and the proportion of the 2,402 orders settled against royalty balances rather than by mobile money is not disclosed.
The mechanism: a sale to the rightsholder, with an optional set-off
Mdundo is a licensee. It owns no master recordings and no publishing. Its catalogue position consists of recordings uploaded directly by artists together with recordings licensed in from third-party rightsholders. Creator Promotions does not alter that. It is a product sold in the opposite direction to the licence: the platform supplies promotional placement, the artist pays for it, and the payment may be taken from money the platform already holds to that artist’s account rather than remitted in cash.
The quarterly statement for Q1 FY2026/27, company announcement 17-2026 of 20 October 2026, states: “Creator Promotions (referred to as artist promotion in the annual report) allows artists to pay to promote their music to Mdundo’s user base, either from their royalty balance or by mobile money. In Q1, 2,402 orders were placed.” The announcement body carries the volume without the payment mechanics: “Creator Promotions, which enables creators to purchase promotional campaigns on Mdundo, generated 2,402 orders during the quarter, following its launch at the end of Q4 FY 2025/26.”
What the audited accounts said, and did not say
The annual report for the year to 30 June 2026, approved and signed on 28 September 2026 and audited by EY Godkendt Revisionspartnerselskab, describes the product without the royalty balance route: “artist promotion was introduced as a new revenue line, under which artists pay the Company to promote their music to its user base.” Revenue is reported in a combined highlights line, “Hereof Artist Promotion & Music Games”, at DKK 0.1m for the financial year, with no split between the two activities. The word royalty does not appear anywhere in the 28 pages of that report.
The only published rate predates the terms change
Mdundo’s own artist-facing site, www.mdundoforartists.com, which mdundo.com links to from its editorial pages, carries a post dated 15 July 2025 stating: “Mdundo pays 50% of its revenue directly to artists, ensuring that musicians benefit from the value their music generates.” The same post states that the 50 per cent share is allocated by download percentage. The post remains published and carries no amendment note. It predates by roughly six months the January 2026 variation of rightsholder terms that the audited accounts credit for the year’s margin improvement. Whether the 50 per cent share survived that variation could not be established from any document checked.
Audited cost of sales for FY2025/26 was DKK 3,383,209 on revenue of DKK 8,267,324, or 40.9 per cent of revenue, against DKK 5,761,323 on DKK 10,965,460, or 52.5 per cent, the year before. Applying the company’s own normalised gross margins of 48.9 per cent and 46.7 per cent implies a cost of sales of roughly 51.1 per cent and 53.3 per cent of revenue respectively. Those two implied percentages are this publication’s arithmetic on the company’s disclosed figures, not sums Mdundo has published.
Related terms in the same quarter
Two further commercial arrangements are disclosed in the same statement. Music gaming, launched in Uganda in Q1 FY2025/26 and expanded to further markets, has been deprioritised for in-house development, and the company “is now testing third-party game providers on a revenue-share basis, which requires no development investment from Mdundo.” The providers are not named and no revenue split is disclosed. Separately, a call-in IVR music service with “a leading telco in Tanzania” was actively marketed for the first time in the quarter, and a microapp inside “a leading partner’s native app” is expected in Q2. Neither partner is named and no terms are disclosed.
On catalogue, the statement records that the licensing team “has restored catalogue from several top East African artists” and ran “a commemorative campaign for Lucky Dube’s catalogue”. Why the restored catalogue had left the service is not stated, the artists are not named, and who licenses the Lucky Dube catalogue to Mdundo is not stated.
