FAVE’s “Baby Riddim” has crossed 100 million streams on Spotify, and the milestone says as much about the platform’s rise in Nigeria as it does about the song.
The record becomes the 100th Nigerian song to reach the mark, and the second for FAVE after her Davido collaboration “Kante,” which sits well past 180 million. That number of 100 deserves a pause, because Spotify only opened its doors in Nigeria in February 2021. A little over five years later, a hundred Nigerian songs have already made it to nine figures.
“Baby Riddim” is almost a case study in that timeline. The song dropped in late September 2021, roughly seven months after Spotify’s arrival, so it grew up inside the platform’s early days rather than riding a mature streaming market. Streaming culture in Nigeria was still finding its feet when the record started climbing, and it kept climbing anyway.
The wider list tells the same story in compressed form. Of the 100 songs now past 100 million, 72 were released between 2020 and 2023, and 2022 alone produced 27 of them. Nigerian music did not need a long runway. Once the infrastructure existed locally, the audience was already there, and a global one was ready to meet it.
That is the part worth appreciating. Nigerian songs have always travelled, through diaspora listeners, club culture, and word of mouth. What Spotify’s arrival did was give that demand a counting system, and the numbers have been loud ever since. Hitting 100 million streams is hard on any platform, and doing it this quickly in a market this young is something else.
For FAVE, the moment is bigger than a single stat. “Baby Riddim” is the record that introduced her, and four years on it is still pulling in new listeners. Two songs past 100 million puts her in a select group, and it confirms that her breakout was no passing moment.