Jocelyne Muhutu-Remy and the business of being heard

Long before Jocelyne Muhutu-Remy was helping African musicians reach new listeners, she was growing up in a home where Africa was a daily conversation.

Born in Ethiopia to a Rwandan mother and a Burundian father, she belonged to a continent that could not be contained within one nationality. Her mother worked at the Organisation of African Unity, the predecessor to the African Union. At the dinner table, conversations moved through politics, leadership and the upheavals shaping neighbouring countries. Diplomacy was close to the family’s working life; the ordinary pressures of an Addis Ababa neighbourhood were close to home.

Her later career would take her through Reuters, Viacom, Disney and Facebook before bringing her to Spotify. The work changed from reporting stories to negotiating their distribution, then to helping creators build audiences on digital platforms. Her knowledge of Africa travelled with her.

By September 2026, she is approaching five years as Spotify’s managing director for Sub-Saharan Africa. The job now involves an increasingly practical ambition. African music should travel across borders, but an artist should also be able to earn from the people who understand the words without a translation.

Learning the continent, then the business.

Muhutu-Remy went to France to study. Her education encompassed languages, journalism and international relations, giving her both the means to work across cultures and a professional interest in the forces shaping them.

Reporting brought her into contact with the people making decisions she had once heard discussed at home.

In a September 2026 interview with Communiqué, she recalled being a young reporter at the Paris-based magazine L’Autre Afrique and asking to join Kofi Annan’s travelling press contingent. The initial response was discouraging. Then, two days before the trip, an invitation came. She was 26, working for a small publication, and had asked for a place among the journalists covering the United Nations secretary-general.

Nairobi became an important chapter in her working life. At Reuters, she reported on Africa before moving into the commercial side of the organization. The transition required her to learn a different discipline. Knowing how to produce journalism was one thing. Persuading another media business to pay for it required an understanding of its audience, budget, and ambitions.

She already knew the product. She had helped make it. Her reporting relationships and familiarity with African markets gave her a foundation from which to learn sales and business development.

A news organization could have excellent reporting and still struggle to reach the people who would value it. Distribution agreements determined which broadcasters could carry that reporting and which audiences would encounter it. Muhutu-Remy began working on those agreements.

For someone whose early life had been shaped by conversations about Africa, the move into business did not require abandoning the continent. It required learning how its media organisations bought, sold and sustained their work.

Following the relationships.

An encounter through the African Leadership Network introduced her to Alex Okosi, then at Viacom, the company behind MTV Base. A subsequent opportunity took her into entertainment distribution.

News and entertainment demanded different commercial judgments. A broadcaster buying a news service was not making the same decision as one buying music programming or a children’s channel. But both needed content their viewers would return to, at a price the business could support.

At Viacom, Muhutu-Remy worked on the distribution of channels and content across African markets. Disney followed, with responsibility for content distribution in Africa. She then moved to Facebook, now part of Meta, where her work centred on strategic media partnerships in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Each move brought her closer to a changing relationship between the person creating something and the person consuming it. Television distribution involved agreements between businesses. Social platforms allowed publishers and creators to build direct followings, while leaving them dependent on the platform’s rules for discovery and income.

Her approach to leadership emphasizes giving colleagues room to develop their abilities and take responsibility. In work spread across countries and languages, a regional executive can negotiate a partnership, but colleagues close to an audience still have to understand what will make people watch, listen and return.

By the time Spotify approached her, she had worked on both sides of the media business. She had produced content and sold access to it, supported publishers and worked with entertainment companies whose programmes travelled internationally.

She became Spotify’s managing director for Sub-Saharan Africa in November 2021. Earlier that year, the platform had announced an expansion into more than 80 additional markets, including Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana. Her task was to help build the business within those markets, beyond the initial availability of the app.

Making room for familiar voices.

Muhutu-Remy’s original ambition at Spotify was to make the service accessible and relevant to African audiences while helping African creators reach listeners elsewhere.

That meant paying attention to more than the internationally successful genres. Afrobeats and Amapiano could bring new listeners to the platform. Local music, familiar voices and conversations in the language people used with friends could give them reasons to stay.

In October 2022, Spotify announced a US$100,000 Africa Podcast Fund supporting 13 creators. Kenyan recipients included The Sandwich Podcast, The Messy Inbetween, Mantalk.ke and Nipe Story. Their subjects included relationships, work and African fiction. Some moved between English, Kiswahili and Sheng.

A listener did not need to be looking for an explanation of Africa. They could be looking for a conversation that sounded like their own life.

By February 2026, Spotify’s five-year review of Kenya reported more than 203 million hours of music listening during 2025. The company also reported that local listening to music in Kenyan indigenous languages had grown by more than 101 percent over the five years.

Foreign stars still occupied much of the country’s listening time. Drake, Chris Brown and Burna Boy were among the most-streamed artists across that period. But Bien’s Inauma, Njerae’s Aki Sioni and Mutoriah’s Beta also appeared among the most-played songs in the review. Kenyan listeners were making room for both.

In July 2026, Spotify took some of that listening into a physical space. Its Greasy Tunes residency at Nairobi’s Heltz House brought together music, fashion and live podcast recordings. BURUKLYN BOYZ performed, while producer Eric Musyoka featured in a live recording of Culture Club.

The programme was organised around a city’s existing habits and creative communities. Local teams and partners supplied the relationships that an app alone could not create. For Muhutu-Remy, who had entered entertainment through relationships built in the media business, that kind of work was familiar.

Getting from a listener to a livelihood.

Her experience at Spotify has also challenged some of her own assumptions.

Speaking to Citizen Digital in May 2026, Muhutu-Remy said listening and willingness to pay had exceeded her expectations, despite data costs and economic pressures. Audiences were prepared to spend on a service they valued and could afford.

Spotify says it paid more than US$11 billion to music rights holders globally in 2025, with independent artists and labels accounting for about half the royalties. Those payments belong to a worldwide business, rather than to its African operation alone.

The route from a listener’s subscription to a musician’s income has several stages. Spotify receives subscription and advertising revenue and allocates royalties according to the music’s share of listening. It pays rights holders, who then pay artists and songwriters under their agreements. There is no universal fixed payment for each stream.

A label or distributor may stand between the platform and the performer. The artist’s contract helps determine how much eventually reaches them. A growing royalty pool can therefore coexist with very different experiences among musicians, depending on their audience and the terms under which their work is released.

Muhutu-Remy’s challenge is to grow a service listeners can afford while helping build a market that can sustain the people making the music. Raising the price brings in more money from a subscriber who stays, but risks losing someone whose entertainment budget is already stretched. Expanding the paying audience offers another route, provided that joining and renewing are straightforward.

In the same interview, she identified wider access to local payment methods and transparent, efficient royalty organisations as priorities. Listeners need ways to pay, and musicians need dependable systems for receiving their money.

For a Kenyan financial-services audience, the first problem is familiar. A customer can have a phone, money and the intention to buy, yet fail at the payment stage. Accepting the method they actually use turns that intention into a sale. Requiring an unfamiliar card or an awkward currency conversion can lose the customer before the first paid month begins.

Royalties require the journey to work in the other direction. Reaching a listener creates an opportunity to earn; clear agreements and dependable payment arrangements help turn it into income an artist can plan around. A musician booking another studio session needs to know what is coming in, when it will arrive and what has been deducted.

Earning a living in your own language.

Muhutu-Remy has spent much of her career helping content cross borders. At Spotify, she also wants a viable career to be possible for a musician whose strongest following remains close to home.

Asked by Citizen Digital what success would look like, she offered an ambition a Kenyan listener could recognize immediately.

“That you can sing Benga in Dholuo and make a sustainable living from it.”

An international breakthrough can transform an artist’s prospects. A durable domestic market gives more musicians room to work without needing one. It allows an audience’s attachment to a language, a place or a familiar experience to support the person who puts it into a song.

For Muhutu-Remy, that would bring the business closer to the Africa she grew up knowing. Her childhood held several countries and political histories within one family. Her career has moved through institutions that decide which stories and sounds travel. Now part of her work is to help those sounds earn their keep where they began.

The musician should not have to leave their language behind to pay for the next recording.