Mdundo.com A/S, the Danish-listed company behind one of Africa’s largest music download and streaming services, has started selling promotional campaigns to the artists whose music it carries. Artists can pay for those campaigns out of the royalty balance the company is holding to their account.
That is the company’s own wording, in a regulatory filing made on 20 October 2026 to Nasdaq First North Growth Market Denmark, and the first time the payment mechanism has reached the public record. The product is called Creator Promotions. It launched at the very end of the financial year to 30 June 2026 and took 2,402 orders in the following three months.
What actually changed hands#
No copyright moved. This is not a catalogue sale, not an assignment, and not a publishing deal. It is the creation of a new commercial relationship running in the opposite direction to the licence that already exists between Mdundo and the artists on its service.
Under the licence, the artist supplies recordings and Mdundo pays the artist a share of what the service earns. Under Creator Promotions, Mdundo supplies promotional placement and the artist pays Mdundo. The filing describes two ways of settling that payment: mobile money, or the artist’s royalty balance.
The second route is the one worth slowing down on. A royalty balance is money the platform has recognised as belonging to the artist but has not yet paid out. Letting the artist spend it on the platform’s own promotional inventory converts a liability the platform owes into revenue the platform earns, with no cash entering or leaving the artist’s bank account. It is a set-off: the platform selling a service to a counterparty whose money it already holds.
There is nothing improper about that structure, and it lowers a real barrier: an artist in Nairobi or Dar es Salaam who has earned a balance but cannot easily move money across borders can now spend it. The point is narrower. The arrangement puts Mdundo on both sides of the transaction, and its volume has been disclosed while its economics have not.
Does Mdundo own any of this music?#
No. Mdundo is a licensee, and the distinction matters. The company owns no master recordings and no publishing in the catalogue it distributes. Its position consists of recordings uploaded directly by artists plus recordings licensed in from third-party rightsholders such as labels and distributors. Its audited balance sheet for the year to 30 June 2026 carries one rights-like intangible, described as acquired concessions, patents, licenses, trademarks and similar rights, at a book value of DKK 7,605,819 against an original cost of DKK 19,834,797. The report does not break down what that balance consists of, so it cannot be read as a catalogue holding.
So when Mdundo changes its terms with rightsholders, or sells promotion back to them, it is adjusting a contractual relationship, not moving ownership. Treating the two as the same thing is the most common error in this part of the industry.
What the filings leave out#
How much did Creator Promotions earn?#
Not disclosed, and the gap is wider than one missing number.
The quarterly statement gives the order count, 2,402, and nothing else. It gives no price per order, no revenue figure for the quarter, and no split between the orders settled by mobile money and those settled out of royalty balances. Without that split there is no way to tell whether the royalty balance route is the main way artists are buying promotion or a marginal option mentioned for completeness.
The audited annual report for the year to 30 June 2026, signed on 28 September 2026 with an unmodified audit opinion from EY Godkendt Revisionspartnerselskab, does carry a revenue figure, but it is combined. A highlights line reads “Hereof Artist Promotion & Music Games” at DKK 0.1m for the full year, with no split between the two activities. Since the promotion product only launched at the end of that year, its contribution to the DKK 0.1m is likely to be small, but the report does not say.
One further detail from that report is worth recording plainly: across its 28 pages, the word royalty does not appear once. The company’s audited accounts describe the promotion product as a line “under which artists pay the Company to promote their music to its user base”, with no mention of the royalty balance route that the quarterly statement discloses three weeks later. The two documents are not in conflict. The later one is simply more specific than the audited one.
The only rate Mdundo has published is fifteen months old#
If an artist wants to work out what spending a royalty balance costs them, they need to know how that balance is calculated. Here the record is thin and, on its face, out of date.
Mdundo’s artist-facing site carries a post dated 15 July 2025 which states that “Mdundo pays 50% of its revenue directly to artists”, allocated by each artist’s share of total downloads on the platform. That post is still live and carries no amendment note.
It also predates, by roughly six months, a change the company itself describes as material. In its half-year report of 5 February 2026, Mdundo said it had “updated its terms and conditions with rights holders that have an account with Mdundo to more accurately reflect the direct costs of operating the music service”, and expected that to improve gross margin by five percentage points. The annual report then credited those January 2026 terms for a margin improvement, guiding to a gross margin near 54 per cent in the current year against a normalised 48.9 per cent last year. This publication examined that margin arithmetic in a separate piece on the terms change, and the underlying transaction is recorded as a deal in its own right.
Whether the 50 per cent share survived that variation could not be established. The published rate says 50 per cent. The company says the rightsholder terms changed in a way that improved its own margin. No document checked reconciles the two, and no revised rate has been published anywhere this publication could find.
What else the quarter put on the record#
Three other commercial arrangements surface in the same filing, each disclosed without a counterparty.
Music gaming, launched in Uganda a year earlier and since expanded, has been deprioritised for in-house development. The company says it “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 the revenue split is not given.
A call-in voice service with “a leading telco in Tanzania” was marketed for the first time during the quarter, and a microapp inside “a leading partner’s native app” is expected in the current quarter. Neither partner is named and no terms are disclosed. Telco subscription payments, still the largest part of the business, fell about 17 per cent against the previous quarter.
On catalogue, the filing says the licensing team “has restored catalogue from several top East African artists” and ran “a commemorative campaign for Lucky Dube’s catalogue”. Restored implies it had come off the service and gone back on. Why it left is not stated, the artists are not named, and who licenses the Lucky Dube recordings to Mdundo is not stated.
What this means for artists#
First, if you hold a royalty balance with Mdundo, know that it can now be spent on the platform’s own promotional inventory. That is an option, not an obligation, but know it before you see it offered in your account.
Second, ask for the price. No price per campaign has been published, and an artist cannot judge whether a campaign is worth a given slice of a balance without knowing both numbers.
Third, ask what your royalty rate is now, in writing. The only rate on Mdundo’s published artist pages dates from July 2025, and the company has since told investors that rightsholder terms changed. The artist-facing document has not been updated to match.
Fourth, treat a set-off as a payment. Spending a balance is not free promotion. It is the artist paying with money already earned, and it should be judged against what else that money could have bought.
What could not be established#
The price per Creator Promotions order. Creator Promotions revenue for the quarter. The proportion of the 2,402 orders settled from royalty balances rather than mobile money. The split of the combined DKK 0.1m annual line between artist promotion and music games. Whether the 50 per cent revenue share survived the January 2026 terms variation, and what the old and new rightsholder rates are. How many rightsholder accounts the variation affected, and whether those rightsholders consented. What Mdundo distributed in royalties during the year to 30 June 2026: the previous year’s annual report contains the sentence “Royalty distributions to artists exceeded DKK 4.8,” with no unit, in both the original and corrected versions, and the latest report gives no figure at all. What share of the DKK 9,003,491 of trade payables on the balance sheet is owed to rightsholders.
Searches of mdundo.com and of the company’s artist-facing site found no published terms page for Creator Promotions. Mdundo was not asked for comment before publication, and this piece will be updated if the company provides any of the figures above.
Separately, a non-binding proposal for roughly 40 per cent of the company, recorded here in April 2026, is not mentioned in either the annual report or the quarterly statement. Its status is unresolved on the public record.
This transaction is recorded in full in our deal database.
