Rising up the scale
From soukous to Kigali Boyz Group and the internet to mobile operators, Peter Griffiths tracks the rise of East Africa’s urban music
Illustrations Wesley Valenzuela
The days of African city boys plucking tunes on their box guitars and radio-phonographs playing the latest ‘international’ fare are long gone. Today it is possible to log on to YouTube and find examples of pretty much every music genre Africa has ever produced.
Unlike in the past, which saw several of Africa’s best musicians packing up for more developed markets, as was the case in the 1980s with the rise of soukous (aka African rumba) in Brussels and throughout Europe, artists can now stay at home and have an audience anywhere in the world. With the internet now widely accessible throughout Africa, everyone has an opportunity to harness and enjoy African talent, and job opportunities have been produced that would have been unthinkable even 15 years ago.
However, the ease of upload and distribution means that there’s inevitably lots of other content on the web. So while the traditional barrier to entry has been removed, it becomes increasingly difficult to become known.
Greater access to the internet as an international marketing machine comes at a price, a price perhaps too high for some. According to President of the Musicians Union of Ghana, Alhaji Sidiku Buari, globalisation has just resulted in musicians “expending all their energies trying to sound like Michael Jackson, 50 Cent, Jay-Z, Beyoncé, P Diddy, etc”. But be that as it may, with access to marketing comes audiences and, as Google Inc. knows all too well, with audiences comes money.
Several African musicians have managed to take advantage of the revenue-stream potential the internet provides by offering listeners, home-grown and abroad, sounds that are unique. By doing this, they have ensured that Africa isn’t just a source of inspiration, but is also rightfully part of the international music scene.
Some artists create their own websites, while others take advantage of the upload sites available across various social-media networks. Others do both. But it’s the artists who also build up a repertoire across traditional broadcast channels who are the most likely to succeed.
There’s Jabali Afrika, for example, who claim to be Kenya’s most successful band ‘with more than 70,000 records independently’ sold. They first found success on the radio in 1993. But today, you can find them on their own dedicated website (www.jabaliafrika.com), on CD Baby, LinkedIn, MySpace and Facebook, and they even have their own channel on YouTube.
Moses Kemibaro, who owns internet design company Dotsavvy and supports Kenya Music Week, believes that “there is no better channel than the internet for distributing and selling music”. He adds that “many of Kenya’s leading musicians now have profile pages and do their marketing via social networks even if they don’t have their own websites”.
Across East Africa are examples that prove Moses’ point. Rwanda’s Sandra Karigirwa has a rudimentary website that allows users to buy and sample some of her music. Juliana Kanyomozi from Uganda abandoned plans to have her own fansite in 2006, instead adopting a free MySpace profile page. Juliana, like Khadja Nin of Burundi, also has a Wikipedia entry, an indication that their fans accept them as being part of contemporary history.
But it’s not just the internet that is driving album sales. Radio and mobile operators also provide a platform for musicians to get their music out there and heard. Rwanda installed its first private FM radio station – Radio 10 – five years ago. Since then, four other private stations have sprung up, and the growth of local celebrities, like Rafiki, Queen Allay, Miss JOJO and Kigali Boyz Group (KGB), has not gone without reward.
And late last year, MTN, the largest mobile-phone operator in Africa, signed a collaboration deal with KGB, which would see MTN paying to have the band include MTN-branded words in their songs. But in this case, MTN got a bonus in that band member Gaston Rurangwa also presents on Contact FM, one of Kigali’s most listened-to radio stations. In the future, MTN Rwanda’s data network could support a radio station playing tunes from locally supported artists onto a handset near you.
And if Rwandan President, Paul Kagame, has his way, the internet will reinvent his tiny central African nation, allowing radio and internet to become one and the same. Kenya and Uganda have similar aspirations, and this can only encourage more artists and their fans onto the web.
What is yet to happen is for large international brands to build up and sponsor local artists on the web, in order to tap into the growing consumer markets across Africa. But it will happen as soon as they realise how much cheaper and easier it is to work with local celebrities, and that the next internet evolution will crown local content as king.
Music trivia
5-million+
The number of hip-hop, rap and rock artists trying to get noticed on MySpace
450+
The number of legally licensed digital music websites globally
<0.1%
The number of legally licensed digital music websites in Africa
€2.8-billion+
Estimated record industry revenue from digital sales in 2008
15-25%
Digital music revenue percentage of total music market revenue