In 2024, South African artists earned R400 million in royalties from Spotify—a 54% increase over the previous year.
And South African artists could be in for more as Aleph has expanded their partnership with Spotify to manage Global Advertising Sales in over 80 markets.
Aleph and Spotify’s expanded partnership marks a new era for South African advertisers, offering brands the tools to connect with a diverse and digitally engaged audience. With South Africa’s love for music and storytelling, this partnership enables advertisers to tap into moments that resonate with local listeners, whether the high-energy soundtracks of morning commutes or the relaxing playlists defining weekend downtime. With advanced targeting options and innovative formats like Canvas and Opt-in Video, this collaboration empowers South African brands to deliver relevant and impactful campaigns.
South Africa, May 20, 2025– Aleph, a global network of digital experts innovating at the intersection of media and payments, and Spotify, the world’s most popular audio streaming subscription service, today announced an expanded partnership that makes Aleph Spotify’s advertising sales partner in 80+ markets , providing access to 20,000+ advertisers.
Spotify Advertising has been modernising its ad tech, strengthening its partnerships and deepening its human expertise to make it easier for advertisers to buy, create, measure, and get clear results on Spotify’s ad platform. Spotify’s efforts reflect a significant step forward in automated buying and creative innovation for the ad platform and the broader digital audio industry. Most notably, Spotify is continuing to innovate its self-serve platform, Spotify Ads Manager, with more advanced targeting capabilities, new 1P & 3P measurement solutions, and new outcome-based objectives to help advertisers of all sizes create, optimise, and measure their Spotify campaigns, including Spotify Pixel, Custom Audiences, key third-party partnerships and a new App Installs objective.
Aleph has been a trusted partner to Spotify since 2013, when the initial partnership started with four countries. The newly signed partnership brings Aleph’s comprehensive suite of services—including local media sales, payment solutions, creative support, and performance-driven automation—to effectively monetise Spotify’s advertising inventory and connect the brand with advertisers, streamlining and scaling Spotify’s ad solutions to 80+ markets.
Aleph’s teams will have access to Spotify’s Ads Manager to guide advertisers and agencies to leverage the platform’s full potential of advertising formats and targeting capabilities to ensure they can reach listeners during key moments, such as workout sessions, focused work periods and commuting to provide advertisers and brands with unique opportunities to connect with their target audience when they’re highly engaged and help reach their marketing goals.
Key benefits for advertisers working with Spotify Ads Manager through Aleph include:
- Access to Spotify’s ad formats: Advertisers will be ableto utilise Spotify’s unique audio and video ad formats to craft engaging campaigns. Spotify recently introduced new ad formats available on Ads Manager, including Canvas and Opt-in Video. These new formats reimagine what ads on Spotify can be and how advertisers can engage with people through sight and sound.
- Objective-based buying: The Ads Manager will allowadvertisers to choose goals like reach, impressions, clicks, or video views for highly targeted campaigns. Spotify recently announced new outcome-based objectives to help advertisers of all sizes create, optimise, and measure their Spotify campaigns, including a new App Installs objective and a new Website Traffic Objective.
- Lower costs: Flexible daily or lifetime budgets make Spotify advertising more accessible and cost-effective for partners thanks to Aleph’s campaign management.
“We are thrilled to partner with Spotify on a global scale, and especially excited and happy to extend the partnership to include Sub-Saharan Africa, namely in South Africa, Kenya, Ghana, Tanzania and Uganda,” said Stephen Newton, Managing Director Sub-Saharan Africa at Aleph. “Our shared commitment to innovation and delivering exceptional value for advertisers makes this a natural partnership.”
As we continue to grow our ads business, I’m excited to share that we’ve partnered with Aleph to streamline our operations, offer better solutions to advertisers and scale our business more efficiently. With the launch of our more automated solutions and Aleph’s exceptional global network and deep local expertise, we’re now able to offer advertisers around the world new tools and resources that will help them reach their campaign goals,” said Sam Bevan, Global Head of Emerging & Scaled at Spotify.
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Richard Maponya studied to be a teacher but couldn\’t find work, so he became a stock taker at a clothing manufacturer. His manager sold him soiled clothing and offcuts, which he resold. He made enough capital to open a clothing retailer. In the early 1950\’s Maponya and his wife established the Dube Hygienic Dairy, which delivered milk to customers daily. By the 1970\’s his clothing empire had grown enough for him to branch into other areas, including: general stores, car dealerships and filling stations. In 2007, Maponya Mall in Soweto was opened, one of the largest shopping centres in the country. He continued to focus on Soweto\’s growth by establishing Maponya Motor City, which included a Volkswagen and Toyota dealership.