Lagos’ nightlife scene raked in an estimated ₦2.9 trillion in 2025, according to a new report from TAG by Oui Capital titled “Off the Charts: The Afrobeats Export Economy,” a figure that nearly doubles the ₦1.49 trillion recorded the year before and underscores just how far the city’s after dark economy has grown alongside the global rise of Afrobeats.

The report found that the Detty December window alone, spanning just 55 days, pulled in ₦396.5 billion, a sum that speaks to how central the festive season has become to Lagos’ finances. Yet the biggest winners were not the ticketed concerts and festivals that tend to dominate headlines. Restaurants, bars, clubs and other walk in venues brought in about ₦171 billion during that period, more than three times the roughly ₦50 billion generated by concerts and festivals combined, suggesting that the everyday hospitality circuit, dinners, drinks and rides between venues, is where the real money moves.

Diaspora visitors, though a small slice of the crowd, punched well above their numbers. They made up only 11 percent of Detty December attendees but accounted for a striking 55 percent of total spending, a pattern that highlights the outsized economic weight of Nigerians returning home for the holidays with foreign currency in hand.

The report does flag an important caveat. There is still no official mechanism tracking the full value of Lagos’ nightlife economy, so the figures rest on TAG’s own field research and modelling rather than government data, a gap that researchers say makes it harder to fully capture the sector’s true scale even as its influence keeps expanding.

Photo Credit: ATQ News