Online music streaming has been booming ever since iTunes was released more than a decade ago. With African content for Africans in mind, services such as Nigeria’s iRoking and Kenya’s Waabeh are steadily increasing their online footprints, not only in their respective regions, but internationally as well. The latter recently released an infographic of its performance in the last year, which gives us a snapshot of what the African music streaming industry might look like.
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Since launching in 2013, Waabeh has managed to become the local go-to place for Kenyan artists to easily upload and distribute their music, and at the same time gives them high returns in royalties. The startup has managed more than 10,000 downloads and also seen more than 330,000 streams.
CEO and Co-Founder Tim Rimbui says that the main reason for its success has been the easy-to-use software as well as the stated fact that Waabeh offers higher sales royalties compared to other companies:
“Our promise was a solution that empowered the artists with simple upload and distribution over the internet and mobile apps,” says Rimbui. Waabeh keeps 30% of the royalties while other companies usually keep as much as 80%. The platform also aims to give fans easy and familiar payment options such as credit cards and mobile money MPesa – the latter of which has proven to be very popular.
Rimbui says that Waabeh has managed to increase its user base dramatically and is now serving musicians and fans from across the globe in such varied places like The Democratic Republic of Congo, South Africa and even Japan.
