Five years after launching EQUAL to champion women in music, Spotify is celebrating the milestone in South Africa with a new Spotify Single reinterpretation of Lebo Mathosa’s iconic I Love Music by multi-award-winning artist Shekhinah.
https://www.digital.zenithbank.com/ZEQ/ZEQ-jan-2026/index.html#p=1Originally released in 2006, I Love Music has become more than a dancefloor classic. Twenty years on, the track continues to find new listeners, with more than 1.8 million global streams on Spotify, 88% of which come from South Africa. The song also appears on more than 70k user-generated playlists globally, showing how a song released two decades ago continues to live on in listeners’ everyday soundtrack.
The track began gaining significant streaming traction in South Africa in 2018 and has grown every year since, recording an approximate 95% compound annual growth rate over seven years. Following particularly strong growth in 2019, I Love Music is on pace for another standout year in 2026. The numbers point to something bigger than nostalgia: this is a catalogue favourite that continues to find new audiences.
Its audience is also strikingly cross-generational. Listeners aged 35-44 make up the largest streaming segment, followed by those aged 18-24 and 30-34. Male listeners account for 63% of streams, while the track continues to connect with Gen Z, older millennials and Gen X.
Gauteng is at the heart of the song’s South African listening trends, with Johannesburg leading with more than 700K all-time streams, nearly half of all streams in the country. Collectively, cities across Gauteng, including Johannesburg, Pretoria, Centurion and Midrand, account for more than 75% of the song’s streams in South Africa. Durban, Cape Town and Port Elizabeth round out the top five cities.
Now, Shekhinah is bringing a new generation into the conversation.
Her reinterpretation of I Love Music forms part of Spotify Singles and celebrates the fifth anniversary of EQUAL, Spotify’s global initiative spanning across the Nordics, US, Germany, Portugal and Sub-Saharan Africa. While this is a global movement, the core focus of the story remains here in South Africa, where the collaboration connects two generations of music, honouring the original while giving the song a fresh cultural context.
“Lebo Mathosa’s ‘I Love Music’ has demonstrated something powerful: great South African music evolves, gets rediscovered and finds new listeners,” says Jodie Tabisher. “Shekhinah’s reinterpretation is a celebration of that legacy while giving audiences another reason to connect with a song that has remained part of our musical DNA.”
With continued streaming growth, deep local resonance and strong appeal among younger listeners, Shekhinah’s version has the potential to take I Love Music from a beloved classic to a new-generation soundtrack, proving that some songs don’t age. They get passed down.
Click here to listen to Shekhinah’s version of I Love Music.
