Joshua Baraka overtakes Diamond Platnumz as East Africa’s most streamed artist on Spotify

Ugandan singer Joshua Baraka has emerged as the most streamed artist in East Africa on Spotify, overtaking Tanzania’s Diamond Platnumz based on current monthly listener data.

The shift is drawn from Spotify’s in-app artist metrics, which show Baraka currently pulling over 1.7 million monthly listeners, a rolling 28-day figure that captures how many unique users are streaming an artist at a given time. 

By comparison, Diamond Platnumz, who is long regarded as the region’s biggest streaming force, has recently been seen hovering around 1.5 streams, while Kenya’s top artist Bien-Aimé Baraza sits significantly lower at roughly 650,000 monthly listeners, based on Spotify profile estimates.

The data is sourced directly from Spotify artist pages, where “monthly listeners” is calculated automatically by the platform using a 28-day rolling window. 

This metric is widely used by the music industry to track real-time popularity and audience reach, even though it does not represent total streams.

Baraka first gained attention with songs like NANA and Wrong Places, blending R&B, soul and Afrobeat influences into a sound that resonates across East Africa and beyond.

In 2025, he became the first Ugandan artist to surpass one million monthly listeners on Spotify

His continued growth has now placed him at the top of East Africa’s streaming conversation, reflecting a shift in listener preferences and the increasing cross-border appeal of Ugandan music.

While Spotify does not officially publish a unified East African ranking, the platform’s publicly visible data suggests that Baraka is currently the most streamed artist in the region, based on monthly listener dominance.