213 Artists Chart in 20 or More of Apple Music’s 41 African Markets on Its Music-Video Chart. On Its Songs Chart, 18 Do

213 artists reached 20 or more of the 41 African markets Apple Music publishes a daily chart for, on its music-videos chart. On its songs chart, for the same 41 markets and the same dates, 18 did. Both counts come from the same 2,411 country-days, 16 August to 3 November 2026, in which this desk collected both of Apple’s charts for the same market on the same date.

Apple Music publishes three daily charts for most African markets: songs, albums and music videos. It is the widest chart publisher on the continent, covering 41 African markets against Spotify’s 4, so which of its three tabs a figure came from decides what the figure means. Two of them are read as the same thing, a measure of what a country is listening to. They are not measuring the same country.

Video markets minus songs markets, out of a possible 41, across 2,411 paired country-days from 16 August to 3 November 2026. Mariah Carey charted on the music-videos chart in 37 African markets and on the songs chart in 2.

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Lead artist (normalised)	Video markets minus songs markets
mariah carey	35
playboi carti	35
miley cyrus	34
coolio	33
katseye	31
jack harlow	31
cardi b	31
sam smith	31
ken carson	30
bts	29
lisa	29
21 savage	29
ne-yo	29
nicki minaj	29
lady gaga	29
hurricane wisdom	28
ariana grande	28
olivia rodrigo	28
juice wrld	28
kehlani	28

Source: This desk's own Apple Music daily chart collection (afw_chart_snapshot / afw_chart_entry), retrieved 4 Nov 2026 · download the data

The songs chart behaves like 41 local charts. The video chart behaves like one#

The clearest way to see it is the average. An artist appearing on Apple’s African songs charts in this window reached 1.794 of the 41 markets. On the music-videos charts, the average artist reached 3.888. On the songs chart, 4,200 of 5,533 artists charted in exactly one African market, 75.91 per cent of them. On the video chart, 2,877 of 5,596 did, 51.41 per cent.

That asymmetry is not a rounding artefact at the top of the distribution. It is the top of the distribution. Mariah Carey charted on the music-videos chart in 37 African markets and on the songs chart in 2. Playboi Carti: 36 markets on video, 1 on songs. Miley Cyrus: 37 and 3. Taylor Swift reached 40 of the 41 markets on video, more than any other artist in the window, and 15 on songs.

Run the same test on artists whose African footprint is built on recorded music rather than catalogue video, and it inverts or disappears. DJ Maphorisa charted on African songs charts in 27 markets and on video charts in 5. Ayra Starr charted on songs in 36 markets and video in 37. Rema: 34 and 35. Victony: 34 and 34. Of the 18 artists who cleared 20 African markets on the songs chart, 16 also cleared 20 on the video chart, and 7 sit within three markets of parity. The largest gap in either direction inside that group of 18 runs opposite to the headline, and it is DJ Maphorisa’s 22.

86.04 per cent of video-chart artists are absent from the same country’s songs chart that day#

Taking the two charts for one market on one date and intersecting them, 20,743 artist slots appear on both. 148,635 appear on the video chart and 114,111 on the songs chart. So 86.04 per cent of the artists on an African market’s Apple music-videos chart are not on that market’s Apple songs chart the same day, and 81.82 per cent of the songs-chart artists are not on the video chart.

This is where the composition difference becomes measurable rather than anecdotal. This desk’s own origin registry holds 174 artist names it has already resolved to an African country of origin, built out of Spotify’s four African daily charts, which means it covers Nigeria, South Africa, Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Angola, Ghana, Tunisia and Cameroon and nothing else. Applied identically to both surfaces, that 174-name test confirms 24,943 of the 114,111 songs-chart artist slots as African, 21.86 per cent, and 13,443 of the 148,635 video-chart slots, 9.04 per cent. Both numbers are floors and neither is a measurement of how African either chart is. The comparison between them is the finding: the same narrow test confirms African origin on the songs chart at 2.4 times the rate it does on the video chart.

Nigeria and Ghana are the exceptions. Seychelles and Tunisia are the far end#

No African market in the panel escapes the pattern, but the spread across the 41 is wide and it is not random. Nigeria has the lowest video-only share at 65.66 per cent, Ghana the second lowest at 70.97 per cent, and Liberia the third at 77.39 per cent. These are markets with a domestic recorded-music industry large enough to hold its own song chart and to put the same artists on the video chart.

At the far end, Seychelles ran at 94.61 per cent video-only across 60 paired days, Tunisia at 93.24 per cent across 56, Gabon at 92.80 per cent across 65 and Egypt at 92.19 per cent across 63. São Tomé and Príncipe scores 100 per cent, with 684 songs-chart artist slots, 32 video-chart artist slots and an intersection of zero, but that row should be read as a measurement of a feed rather than of a country: its Apple music-videos chart returned a mean of 1.9 entries per snapshot against 82.6 on its songs chart, so there is almost nothing there to overlap. It is in the table because dropping inconvenient rows is worse, and the next section shows what the headline looks like without it.

The counter-reading: is this just chart depth?#

The strongest objection is mechanical. The two surfaces returned a near-identical number of chart rows across the paired country-days, 270,698 on songs and 265,247 on video, so if the video chart simply spreads the same number of rows across more artists, more artists would reach more markets without anything meaningful differing. That objection is real and it is measurable: the songs chart holds 2.372 chart entries per artist slot and the video chart holds 1.785. The songs chart is the more concentrated surface, one artist stacking several entries at once, and part of the raw artist-count gap is that and nothing else.

So the test is to truncate both charts to the same depth and recompute. If the finding is a depth artefact, it should shrink toward nothing.

It widens. At the top 50 of both charts, 110 artists reach 20 or more African markets on video against 14 on songs. At the top 25, 62 against 8. At the top 10, 22 against 1. The video-only share rises as the charts are cut shallower, from 86.04 per cent at full depth to 88.97, 91.16 and 93.64 per cent. The asymmetry is strongest at the chart positions that actually get seen.

The second objection is concentration: a handful of markets or a handful of artists carrying the whole result. This is the test that has broken other findings on this desk, including its Spotify export column, where removing one release cut the total by a quarter. It does not break this one.

Dropping the single largest market takes the video-only total down 3.67 per cent. Dropping the five largest takes it down 16.38 per cent, across a panel where the largest single market is 3.67 per cent of the total. Dropping the five widest-charting artists moves the breadth total 3.32 per cent. There is no row to remove here that changes the answer, which is what you would expect of a structural difference rather than an event.

Two further restrictions were put on the finding in review, and both are in the table below. Drop the two markets with fewer than 40 paired country-days, which removes São Tomé and Príncipe and Burkina Faso, and scale the market threshold proportionally from 20 of 41 to 19 of 39: the count goes to 230 artists on video against 21 on songs, a ratio of 10.95 against the headline’s 11.83. The thin feeds are not carrying the result.

The other restriction tests the only assumed input in the piece. The 174-name registry covers 9 African countries, so the obvious objection to the 21.86 against 9.04 per cent comparison is that it is really measuring where the registry has been built rather than what the charts hold. Recomputed inside only those 9 markets the gap is 23.79 per cent on songs against 9.49 per cent on video, a ratio of 2.51. Recomputed inside the other 32 markets, where the registry knows almost nobody, it is 21.36 against 8.92, a ratio of 2.39. The two halves agree, which means the registry’s geography is not producing the gap, and the floor is a conservative one in both.

The limits that remain are real and none of them are tested away. These are chart positions, not streams or views: Apple publishes no count against either chart, so nothing here can be added, weighted or priced, and an artist in position 1 counts the same as one in position 96. Artists are matched on a normalised lead-artist string rather than a platform identifier, so two acts sharing a name merge and one act credited two ways splits. The window is 77 collection dates in one quarter. And the panel is 41 markets because that is where Apple publishes both charts, which is already a selected set.

What this is worth to an artist or a label#

Concretely: an African artist’s absence from an Apple music-videos chart in a market where they hold the songs chart is not a demand signal. It is a catalogue-supply signal, and it is close to universal. DJ Maphorisa holding 27 African songs markets and 5 video markets is the shape of a career built on recorded music in a region where the video surface is stocked by rights holders who have been uploading official videos for twenty years. Mariah Carey is on 37 African video charts and 2 African songs charts because her videos are there, in every storefront, permanently.

Two things follow for anyone making a decision. First, if you are buying or pitching on African chart evidence, name the chart. An Apple Music chart screenshot from Chad or Gabon is close to a different dataset depending on which of the three tabs it came from, and 86.04 per cent of the video-chart artists in that market are not on the songs chart that day. Second, the two surfaces are separately contestable. 213 artists hold 20 or more African video markets and 18 hold 20 or more African songs markets, and the overlap between those two groups is small, so a wide video footprint and a wide songs footprint are not the same asset and winning one does not deliver the other. This piece cannot tell you what entering either costs, because Apple publishes no count against either chart and nothing here is priced.

For this desk the finding is narrower and more uncomfortable. Every stream-weighted measure of African music it publishes rests on Spotify’s four African charts. Apple publishes for 41, on three surfaces, and two of those surfaces disagree with each other about who is charting in the same country on the same day more than four times out of five.