Smubu, a South African music streaming company has announced its intentions to expand internationally after hitting a benchmark of 200,000 active monthly users.
The music streaming company has taken African music indigenous to its home country; Kenya, and has made it legally available and accessible to its users.
“What makes us different is that our vision is built on working closely with artists in providing them with a fair share of the revenue for every single download they get on our platform. The platform is technically built to provide statistics, potential revenue, and tracks download numbers and streams”
Jad Aizarani
Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Smubu
Founded in January 2018 and headquartered in Nairobi, the startup has completely focused on delivering musical satisfaction to artists and music lovers alike.
With its growing number of users, it is working on expanding into West Africa where it will be able to access the much larger number of artists and music lovers.
Despite the large base of music artists and music lovers in Nigeria, the country does not have an indigenous music streaming service that can boast of such significant following as Smubu has gotten.
The music streaming industry in Nigeria is largely dominated by the likes of BoomPlay, Mtn Music+, Spinlet and the likes.
This is not to say that music streaming startups are not existing in Nigeria.
For instance, Lasgidi tunes started in 2013 but the startup has gotten little traction since then. With a website that is unfriendly to a first time user, it makes it unnecessarily hard to figure out how to access its services and music.
Another music streaming platform that currently exists in Nigeria with is Orin , this platform allows people to stream songs for free. The company does work with music artists to upload their songs on the page.
The artist and music fan first approach of Smubu, Spinlet and other music streaming platforms have endeared them to both categories on a wider range.
The addition of user-friendly mobile apps to supplement the service being offered by their website also makes it an on-the-go music choice.
Too many copyright infringing sites where you can download Nigerian music exist without the presence of many streaming services that give the artists proper remuneration for their work.
Smubu has managed to balance satisfying its music lovers who use its mobile-friendly app with also ensuring that its artists benefit optimally from their work.
Jad Aizarani
Day by day we are working to unlock the potential of African artists creativity by giving them the opportunity to live off their art by cooperating with them to fight music piracy
Now that another formidable competitor is coming into the Nigerian space, Music streaming platforms in Nigeria can do more to get more artists to put their songs on their platforms and reach more ears.
A user-friendly mobile app and great service also make it easy for music lovers within the country to think twice before making other non-Nigerian music platforms their first choice.
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