A pattern we see constantly: somebody in London, Manchester or Toronto funding a sibling's music career in Lagos, or building their own audience back home while living abroad. The money is in pounds. The audience is in Nigeria. This is how that works.
You can pay in pounds
Nitro shows prices in pounds for customers reading from the UK, at roughly £1 to ₦2,063 today. That rate includes our FX buffer, which we will be straightforward about: it is slightly above the mid-market rate, because we carry the currency risk between when you pay and when we settle with suppliers.
The alternative — quoting a market rate and adding a fee at checkout — is the same money described less honestly.
At today's rate:
- 1,000 Audiomack plays: about £0.70
- 1,000 Spotify plays: about £0.55
- 1,000 Spotify saves: about £0.54
- 10,000 Audiomack plays: about £7
Rates and prices move; check the live page.
The thing worth understanding about the exchange rate
If you are paying in pounds for a Nigerian audience, the exchange rate is working in your favour to an unusual degree. A campaign that would cost a Lagos-based artist real money costs you the price of a coffee.
This cuts both ways and is worth saying plainly: do not mistake cheapness for effectiveness. Spending £50 because it feels like nothing is how people end up with 80,000 plays on a song nobody has shared. The budget being painless does not make the strategy correct.
Spend what a Nigerian artist would spend, in the order we would spend it, and keep the rest.
Where diaspora money goes furthest
Audiomack, by a distance. The audience is in Nigeria and the plays are a fifth of Spotify's price. If the goal is listeners at home, this is the answer.
Instagram for the person, not the post. Diaspora creators building a Nigerian audience usually need the profile to look established before anything else works.
Not Apple Music, despite the temptation. It is what you and your friends abroad use, which makes it feel like the important platform. Your Nigerian audience is not there. We wrote about this.
The two audiences problem
Most diaspora creators are quietly serving two audiences — people at home who knew them before, and people abroad who found them since. Those audiences are on different platforms, respond to different content, and pull in opposite directions.
You do not have to solve that. But you should decide which one the money is for, before you spend it. A campaign aimed at both usually reaches neither.
Sending money for somebody else
If you are funding an artist or business back home rather than yourself, two practical notes:
Fund the account, do not send cash. Money in a wallet gets spent on the thing it was sent for. Money sent by transfer gets spent on the thing that was urgent that week. This is not cynicism, it is just how money works.
Agree the plan first. The most common way this goes wrong is the person abroad paying for promotion the person at home did not want and does not believe in. Read the platform guide together and pick the order together.
What does not change
Test small first, wherever you are paying from. The exchange rate does not make a bad first order into a good one — it just makes it easier to make several.