Sony Music pulled its catalog from the streaming service Boomplay on Monday (Dec. 9) due to late royalty payments, Billboard has confirmed.
Several other prominent labels and distributors also confirmed to Billboard on Monday that they have not received recent royalty payments from the service. Additionally, a monthly payment report published by the distributor Symphonic on Dec. 2 notes that payments from Boomplay are excluded from April 2023 to September 2024 “due to delays in receiving the statements and/or payments from these partners.”
Sony’s move was first reported by Pulse NG. A rep for Sony Music declined to comment. A rep for Boomplay did not respond to a request for comment.
In 2019, Boomplay announced that it had raised $20 million in Series A funding with the goal of becoming “the number one player in the whole music ecosystem for African music,” according to CEO Joe He.
“The African music industry is not like in America or Europe where there is one big label who takes care of thousands of artists,” Phil Choi, Boomplay’s head of international acquisitions and partnerships, said at the time. “At the moment, there are a lot of musicians that work independently or with small labels, so it takes time to build a catalog.”
Boomplay reached its first licensing agreement with Universal Music Group in 2018. It subsequently signed deals with Sony Music and Warner Music Group the following year and forged an agreement with the independent label organization Merlin in 2021. Boomplay announced that its streams counted towards Billboard‘s charts in October 2021.
He, Boomplay’s CEO, told Billboard in 2020 that he believed the service could grow its user base in Africa to 350 million. “It’s a huge market,” he said at the time. In September 2023, the platform said it had 98 million monthly active users on the continent.
Boomplay isn’t the first streaming service to struggle with timely royalty payments in recent years. When TIDAL was sued in 2021, the complaint revealed that the platform had $127 million in liabilities, mostly in the form of unpaid streaming fees to record labels. TIDAL CEO Jesse Dorogusker told Billboard last year that the payment situation had been remedied.