‘Still A Lot Of Work To Do’: Inside The Inaugural Midem Africa

The business of touring was largely drowned out by other topics that demanded attention, like copyrights, streaming, which is still fairly new on the continent, and the importance of data that can be generated from it. What is more, some African countries are still locked down, while others have opened back up. In combination with foreign countries forcing artists and their teams to quarantine for days on end upon arrival, touring is no straightforward issue at the moment, hence there was little of substance to be said about it.

One networking session titled “Touring in Africa” addressed the live side of things. According to host Brahim Elmazned, founder of the Visa For Music conference in Morocco, there are at least 16 African countries he considers “well-developed and organized” in terms of live touring infrastructure, like South Africa, Senegal in Western Africa or Kenya in the east. Other countries, like Mali for instance, have a huge musical heritage, but are simply too dangerous at the moment. 

Speaking to Pollstar, he said artists touring the south of Europe in particular should consider including an Africa run, seeing that it was so close. “Africa is the new market to watch at the moment, because it’s a young country with a lot of vibe and a lot of good music. New events started to develop in Eastern and Western Africa. It’s a big market, and people are investing in it. The majors are now in Africa, too.”

One Midem Africa panel looked at the worldwide phenomenon that is “Jerusalema,” the song released at the end of 2019 by Master KG featuring Nomcebo, which was approaching 420 million YouTube views at press time. One of the panelists, aside from Nomcebo herself, was Phiona Okumu, head of music for Sub-Saharan Africa at Spotify. She said the forced downtime of live helped streaming finally gain the kind of traction it was already enjoying in other parts of the world. 

“In Europe, America, in all other parts of the world, streaming is almost a given, it’s the default way music is consumed. Whereas for us, it’s been maybe five years that it’s started to take off,” she explained. For the longest time, according to Okumu, an African career in music has been “very hand to mouth. You make a song so that it can become popular and you can do shows. That’s how you make a living. Now, with lockdown, this was no longer a viable opportunity. [But] we can certainly make a living, even though we are not touring, if our songs are visible, if they are heard around the world. Streaming now offers that opportunity.”

In another session, Helena Kosinski, VP Global at MRC Data, gave the audience some numbers to put streaming into context. She showed a selection of artists from various African countries, who are all among the top 10,000 most-streamed artists worldwide. The list included Soolking (Algeria), Aya Nakamura (Mali/France), Burna Boy, Wizkid, and Davido (all Nigeria), Amr Diab and Tamer Hosny (both Egypt), Ninho and Fally Ipupa (Democratic Republic of the Congo), and Master KG (South Africa). 

However, these artists make up 0.3% of all the streams in that top 10,000 category, indicating that the continent was “still in its very early stages.” This is confirmed by a look at the top 10,000 artists in the U.S. over the last couple of years, which shows, that this year to date only 0.1% of all streams are by artists out of Africa. Two-thirds of those streams are generated by the english-speaking artists. 

A key driver of international growth will be collaborations between African and U.S., UK and European artists. Burna Boy has been doing this most effectively, collaborating with Justin Bieber, Sam Smith and Storzmy on different occasions, Wizkid has worked with Beyoncé and Drake. Robin Schulz teaming up with Wes for “Alane” is another example.

Kosinski made the case for why she thinks music out of Africa is likely to see the kind of rise and success K-pop has seen over these past few years. She brought up Psy’s massive viral global hit Gangnam Style, which amassed more than four billion views on its official YouTube channel since 2012. 

Like Jerusalema, it entered the U.S. single charts, and became a hit in all around the world. The song wasn’t performed in English and it created a dance craze, just like Jerusalema, releases at the end of 2019. “From then onwards we’ve seen a gradual increase in the success of K-pop bands and K-pop artists in the U.S. and the rest of the world. 10 years of growth of K-pop have led to today, where we have the biggest band in the world, BTS, who are a truly global hit. The rise of K-pop was not some immediate thing, where suddenly the world discovers this. It has been 10 plus years of consistent growth and breaking new acts and incremental success. And I think that’s something that we will see from music out of Africa, in various forms,” she said.

Kosinski’s five most important indicators that Afro-pop is going to be huge in the coming months are (1) the collaborations with international stars, (2) a big runaway hit a la “Despacito” or “Gangnam Style,” which helps cement music that’s not performed in English in the listeners psyche, (3) the huge African diaspora, especially in the U.S., which is “very influential” in shaping taste, (4) mainstream artists and producers incorporating African influences into their songs, and (5), “the demographic power of Africa as a continent with over a billion people [and] many countries.

One of the continent’s rising artists is Joeboy from Nigeria, who gave a keynote interview to Juan Gomez, music curator at Pandora Media for the African continent. The artist said, that there was a lot of potential to make money off music, particularly compared with three years ago, when a lot of building blocks were still missing from the continent’s music infrastructure. According to the artist, the country is still lacking in terms of structural organization and monetization of content. 

Finding the missing building blocks and putting them in place was the central theme of this inaugural Midem Africa edition. And while the various sessions showed that collaboration between artists is already strong, the conference also highlighted that meaningful collaboration between Africa’s music industries and companies, still needs to be forged. It may be one continent, but it is vast in scope, and each territory has its own culture, language, demographic, economy, as media consultant Juliana Koranteng, founder of JayKay Media Consultancy, highlighted during the “Jerusalema” panel. 

Michael Ugwu, CEO of Freeme, confirmed this during the Fostering a Pan-African Music Industry session, where he said, “We’re not one homogenous body as people seem to believe, on the continent. It’s very different what happens in the east, what happens in the west, what happens in the south. Fostering better relationships across the continent is something I’ve worked on over the years, but it hasn’t proven to be easy. We still have a lot of work to do.”