The number was wrong.
It could not be proven.
In 2022, Anyadike Divine Chigozirim uploaded a debut single to a major distributor. Over the next eighteen months it was streamed 620,000 times on Spotify, according to the artist profile.
The royalty statement said 412,000 streams. The distributor’s explanation was a PDF about “adjustments”.
The number was wrong. It could not be proven.
A year went into building a reconciliation model in Excel. By the time it was finished, it had found three distinct underpayment categories and a total shortfall of ₦ 840,000 across fourteen months.
Adaeze got a call about it. She looked at the spreadsheet and said: “This is a business, not a spreadsheet. Let’s rebuild it properly.”
Five people. One producer, one data engineer, and a rights specialist who has seen the other side of the table.
Anyadike Divine Chigozirim
CEO & Co-founder
Second-time founder — co-founded a Lagos ticketing startup in 2020, acquired by a regional events platform in 2023. Also a producer and recording artist under the stage name Divine, with two commercial releases in Afrobeats and Alte. In 2022, streaming numbers stopped matching the royalty statements, and a year went into getting the distributor to explain the discrepancy. No explanation came. An MSc in Music Business at BIMM Institute followed in 2023, and with it a spreadsheet model built to audit those statements. The spreadsheet became Stavemusictech.
“I made the spreadsheet for myself. Then my producer asked me to run it on his statements. Then his manager asked me to run it for twelve artists. That is when I knew it was a product.”
Adaeze Ikenna
CTO & Co-founder
BSc Computer Science, University of Nigeria Nsukka. Three years as a data engineer at Spotify via an Andela contract, which gave her a direct view of how streaming royalty data flows — and precisely where it breaks. She left in 2023 and returned to Lagos. She owns Stavemusictech’s Textract pipeline, its Bedrock agents, and the royalty data model underneath both.
“Royalty data is structured chaos. Every distributor has their own format. Every DSP calculates per-stream rates differently. Stavemusictech’s first job was learning to read all of them.”
Jordan Hayes
Head of Rights
Nine years at PRS for Music in the UK, then a music rights consultant for several British independent labels. Met Divine at a Music In Africa conference in Cape Town in July 2024 and joined as an equity co-founder. He owns Stavemusictech’s royalty methodology, its relationships with the collecting societies — COSON, PRS, ASCAP — and the escalation strategy behind every dispute the platform sends.
Chisom Eze
Data Analyst
BSc Statistics, University of Lagos, with a background in financial data reconciliation. Joined in January 2025. When a distributor invents a statement format Stavemusictech has not seen before, it lands on her desk first and becomes a parser rule second.
The founding problem
Divine’s debut single is streamed 620,000 times on Spotify. The royalty statement says 412,000. The distributor sends a PDF about "adjustments".
The spreadsheet
A year of manual reconciliation in Excel finds three distinct underpayment categories and a shortfall of ₦840,000 across fourteen months.
The team
Divine and Adaeze rebuild the model properly. Jordan Hayes joins from PRS after meeting Divine at Music In Africa in Cape Town.
Incorporated
Stave Music Technology Ltd. is registered in Lagos State.
Pre-seed
₦12M closed from music industry angels, including a label owner and a DSP regional executive.
First pilots
Three management firms onboard roughly sixty artists between them.
The numbers
220 statements audited. 38 disputes raised. 14 settled.
Next
COSON integration and public launch.
Artists should know exactly what they are owed.
Not a guess. Not an approximation. A cited, auditable figure with the rate card and the statement reference attached to it.
A dispute letter is only useful if someone opens it.
We write letters that distributors take seriously, because they are specific, sourced, and professional. No emotion. No allegations. Just the numbers and where they came from.
Metadata is money.
Most royalty leakage is not fraud — it is fixable metadata. We fix the problem and then prevent it from recurring.
We are based in Lekki, Lagos — the same streets where Afrobeats was built from bedroom studios into a global industry. The infrastructure of that industry is catching up. Stavemusictech is part of that catch-up.