Deal sheet
- Status
- Announced 8 July 2022. Confirmed once in the audited annual report for FY2021/22. Not named in any Mdundo audited annual report since. Current status could not be established.
- Type
- Licensing
- Parties
- Mdundo, Universal Music Group, Universal Music Africa, Universal Music South Africa
- Amount
- Not disclosed
- Rights covered
- Licence to make Universal Music Group recorded-music catalogue available on the Mdundo service. No master ownership transferred. No publishing or composition rights mentioned in the source.
- Territory
- "Key African territories" (not enumerated in the source)
- Announced
- 2022-07-08
- Primary document
- Regulatory filing
- Sources
- Mdundo.com A/S, Company Announcement no. 6-2022, Nasdaq First North Growth Market Denmark, 8 July 2022 (Contains inside information) · Company Announcement no. 6-2022, PDF as filed: the operative licence sentence and the three named executives · Mdundo.com A/S annual report FY2021/22, audited by Grant Thornton, adopted at AGM 27 October 2022: the only audited document naming Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Believe Digital, with the 1.7 million licensed songs and above 400,000 direct uploads · Mdundo.com A/S annual report FY2022/23: extracted text contains no instance of Universal, UMG, UMA, Warner Music or Believe Digital · Mdundo.com A/S annual report FY2023/24: same absence · Mdundo.com A/S annual report FY2024/25: 839k direct and 3.9 million licensed tracks, Kenya headcount cut from 18 to 12 away from licensing operations, same absence of licensor names
Read this before citing: No consideration, advance, minimum guarantee, per-stream rate, revenue split, term or renewal mechanic was disclosed, and no territory list was published. Mdundo is the licensee and Universal Music Group the licensor: the announcement's operative sentence is ambiguous on direction of grant and is resolved only by the sentence that follows it. Universal Music Group is the stated counterparty; Universal Music Africa appears in the source as a beneficiary of expanded reach, not as a contracting party. The FY2024/25 report prints a royalty distribution figure as 'DKK 4.8' with no unit, so no royalty figure is recorded here.
On 8 July 2022 Mdundo.com A/S told its shareholders, under an inside-information flag, that it had reached an agreement with Universal Music Group to license the service across “key African territories”. Universal granted a licence. It did not sell a catalogue, take a stake or become Mdundo’s distributor. No consideration, term, territory list or royalty basis was disclosed then, and none has been disclosed since. Universal Music Group has not been named in any of the three audited annual reports Mdundo has filed after the one covering the announcement.
What the filing says
Company Announcement no. 6-2022 was published to Nasdaq First North Growth Market Denmark at 09:05:14 CEST on 8 July 2022 and carries the marker “Contains inside information”. That marker matters on its own: it is the board’s judgment that the arrangement was capable of moving the share price of a listed company.
The operative sentence reads: “Mdundo.com A/S, one of Africa’s leading music services, today announced that it has reached an agreement with Universal Music Group (UMG), the world leader in music-based entertainment, to license the service across key African territories.”
Read alone, that sentence does not say which way the grant runs. The next one does: “Under this new licensing agreement, Universal Music Group and Mdundo.com will strengthen Mdundo’s music offering for fans by providing them access to the world’s most comprehensive music catalog, as well as further increasing Universal Music Africa’s (UMA’s) reach within the African market.” The catalogue moves towards Mdundo’s users. Mdundo is the licensee.
Three named people speak in the document: Martin Møller Nielsen, Mdundo’s chief executive; Ulrik Cahn, described as Universal Music Group’s Executive Vice President for the Africa, Middle East and Asia region; and Sipho Dlamini, described as chief executive of Universal Music South Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa. The contracting party named in the operative sentence is Universal Music Group. Universal Music Africa appears as the beneficiary of expanded reach, not as the counterparty.
What is not in it
The announcement states no consideration, no advance, no minimum guarantee, no per-stream rate, no revenue split, no term, no renewal or option structure, and no list of the “key African territories” it covers. It names no artist and no label within the Universal group. It does not say whether the licence covers downloads as well as streams, which matters because Mdundo’s service has historically offered both.
The commercial context the announcement does give is Mdundo’s own: growth “from 5 million monthly users in June 2020 to an expected 19-20 million monthly active users in June 2022 and a +225% growth in revenue for the year ending June 2022”, growth “primarily achieved in Nigeria, with additional growth in Tanzania, Kenya and Ghana”, and telecoms partnerships with Vodacom Tanzania, MTN Nigeria and Airtel Nigeria. On Universal’s side it describes regional headquarters in Johannesburg and Abidjan, offices in Nigeria, Senegal, Cameroon, Kenya and Morocco, and the labels Def Jam Africa, Blue Note Africa and Motown Gospel Africa.
The audited confirmation, once
Mdundo’s annual report for the financial year 1 July 2021 to 30 June 2022, audited by Grant Thornton and adopted at the annual general meeting on 27 October 2022, confirms the announcement and places it in a stack:
“the company announced a licensing agreement with Universal Music Group, one of the leading music companies globally. The company already have existing licensing agreements with Warner Music Group and Believe Digital, which together deliver 1.7 million. songs that are available to Mdundo’s users.”
Two things follow from that wording. First, the licensed stack before Universal was Warner Music Group and Believe Digital, and the 1.7 million figure is attributed to those two, not to Universal. Second, the report says the company “announced” the Universal agreement. It does not state a commencement date, a catalogue delivery or a payment, and the desk has found no document that does.
The same report puts the directly uploaded catalogue at “above 400,000 songs”, up 43 per cent on the year. That is the part of the service that comes from African musicians and rights-holders signing up on Mdundo directly rather than through a licensor.
Then the licensors stop being named
Text extracted from the filed PDFs of Mdundo’s annual reports for 2022/23, 2023/24 and 2024/25 contains no instance of “Universal”, “UMG”, “UMA”, “Warner Music” or “Believe Digital”. In the 2024/25 report the string “believe” appears only inside the auditor’s standard sentence about audit evidence.
The reports keep disclosing the licensed catalogue without attributing it. The 2024/25 report, published September 2025, states: “The total songs available on the service is now 839k directly from artists, complemented by 3.9 million licensed global tracks.” The licensed pool has grown. Who licenses it is no longer stated.
The same report also records that management “reduced headcount in Kenya from 18 to 12 people redirecting the focus from licensing operations and marketing activities towards product development and sales execution”.
What this record does not establish
It does not establish that the Universal licence ended. Mdundo stopped naming Warner Music Group and Believe Digital in the same reports, and those two were described as existing licensors before Universal arrived. The disappearance is a change in what the company discloses, not evidence about what it has signed. Mdundo is under no obvious obligation to re-name a counterparty in every annual report, and the growth in licensed tracks from 1.7 million to 3.9 million is consistent with licences continuing.
It equally does not establish that the licence subsists. No document read by this desk names Universal Music Group as a Mdundo licensor at any date after the 2021/22 annual report. Mdundo’s next audited report, for the financial year to 30 June 2026, is scheduled for release on 28 September 2026 according to Company Announcement no. 14-2026.
