Audiomack
While Afrobeats has been hailed as Africa’s biggest cultural export, its growth on the continent is also cause for celebration.
The 2023 and 2024 IFPI Global Reports revealed Sub-Saharan Africa was the fastest-growing region in the world, with this year’s report documenting a 25% rise in music sales largely driven by increased adoption of paid subscription services (up by just under a quarter). And no other streaming service has been as innovative and effective at expanding their reach on the continent as Audiomack.
The company has been applauded for bolstering artists with user-friendly promotional and analytics tools while providing fans with a solid discovery experience, and its unparalleled work in Africa has been critical in the rise of Afrobeats and other genres on the continent. Audiomack opened its first African office in Lagos, Nigeria in 2020 and made three key hires, including Charlotte Bwana, who officially joined the company as head of media and brand partnerships and has since risen to vp of marketing, EU, Africa & MENA.
Bwana had been living in Nigeria at the time and working in Audiomack’s ambassador program, where she met with and onboarded artists onto the platform and continued expanding its Afrobeats division through social media marketing, idea generation, playlist curation and outreach to major labels, artist managers, booking agents and more. Once travel was allowed after the pandemic, Bwana “literally backpacked across Africa – Nigeria, Ghana, Tanzania, South Africa – doing Audiomack masterclasses, meeting artists and teaching them Audiomack one-on-one but also about the entertainment business,” she tells Billboard. “Somebody said to me, ‘A lot of companies are companies in the cloud, but you are a company that exists, we can actually meet you and shake your hand and call you on the phone. The difference between you and many other streaming companies is your availability.’”
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Bwana emphasizes that that “human touch” element has significantly helped scale Audiomack, which is the No. 1 music streaming app on Apple’s App Store in 22 African countries — including Ghana, Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania and Zimbabwe — and the No. 1 music streaming app on the Google Play Store in Gambia, Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone. According to the company, in Nigeria alone Audiomack boasts 15.3 million monthly active users and 4.9 million daily active users and has racked up 58 billion total Afrobeats streams since 2020.
While the streamer hasn’t added more offices on the continent outside of its Lagos headquarters – which now has 12 people across its social media, graphic design, curatorial, business development and content operations departments – it has deployed ambassadors in additional countries like Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda. Those ambassadors help Audiomack better navigate the African market with “ideas of which artist is popping, which sound is buzzing in this territory, what the scene is like [and] what artists should we be focusing on,” Bwana explains.
Audiomack has also had to focus on tackling two key issues that hinder the platform’s mission to democratize streaming on the continent – the first being accessibility. “In Africa, before we talk about affordability of music, we have to talk about accessibility. A lot of people couldn’t access music in the first place, and Audiomack opened that door… and reshaped the landscape of the African music industry,” Bwana says.
In 2021, the streaming service partnered with MTN Nigeria, the fastest 5G network in West and Central Africa, to introduce the Audiomack+MTN Data Bundle program. Through the program, the company offered the more than 76 million MTN subscribers tailored data bundles, allowing them to stream unlimited music and access Audiomack content without the hassle of data charges. This year, the partnership expanded with the Audiomack+ subscription program, which offers MTN subscribers seamless access to premium Audiomack content – including uninterrupted streaming and offline downloads – through three flexible subscription plans. “We have a monthly subscription, a weekly subscription and a daily subscription, because we figured that people sometimes just buy premium for the day,” says Bwana, adding that 41% of Audiomack users use MTN. “They don’t need it for a month, or they can’t afford to pay that for the month. But if a big artist drops an album today, and they just want to listen to the album, they just pay for premium for the day.”
Still, Africa’s low internet penetration rate poses a problem for users without MTN coverage. According to the International Telecommunication Union’s Facts and Figures 2024 report, just 38% of the continent is able to use the internet, while only 11% have access to a 5G network. Bwana notes that offline downloads are “everybody’s favorite feature” on the app, with Audiomack reporting 1.9 billion offline downloads since 2020. “You’re able to listen to the music on the go whenever you’re not connected,” she says. “This is a premium feature for many DSPs, and for us, it’s a feature that you still can access on the ad-based tier.”
Charlotte Bwana
Courtesy of Charlotte Bwana
This gets to the second major hurdle Audiomack has been tackling: payment. While the company is making sure its different subscription models are suitable for African users’ limited internet access, it’s also ensuring the payment methods are just as convenient. “In Africa, [there are] 54 different countries, and you’re working with many currencies. As you’re scaling a business, you have to figure out how to accommodate the entire continent,” says Bwana. “Seventy percent of the population [in South Africa] is banked, so they have access to credit and credit cards, and they can pay for stuff online. Then you go to Kenya, where everybody uses mobile money. With every country that I’ve been to, not only am I talking to the artists to market them and create content, but I’m also talking to telcos and fintechs and trying to figure out payment systems so we can make it seamless for people to pay for music.”
Last year, Audiomack partnered with Flutterwave, Africa’s largest payment network, to leverage its expertise in secure and reliable payment processing so artists can “monetize their art effectively,” Audiomack CEO/co-founder David Macli said in a press statement. Audiomack can reach even more users in Africa via seamless payment options, including bank transfers, local cards and mobile money. This year, the company also partnered with Carry1st, Africa’s leading mobile games and digital content publisher, to tap into its proprietary payment solution, Pay1st, so consumers can purchase their subscriptions using local payment methods including mobile money, popular digital wallets and bank transfers. “A lot of people on Audiomack are Gen-Z, they’re in that age where they’re discovering music but they’re also gaming,” says Bwana. “We were thinking of how do we bridge the gap between music and gaming, and also, how do we make sure that the artists are earning more royalties and being discovered even by the gamers.”
Outside of accessibility and affordability, artist discovery is another one of Audiomack’s priorities. The platform has been identifying the continent’s rising stars before they gain global recognition through Keep the Beat Going, an annual campaign that focuses on amplifying artists’ profiles and introducing them to new global markets through billboards in major cities, playlists, digital ads, creator workshops and more. Since its launch in 2022, Keep the Beat Going has highlighted 72 artists from Ghana, Tanzania, Nigeria, South Africa and Kenya, including Ayra Starr, Burna Boy, Rema and Uncle Waffles.
Aside from artists, Audiomack is also keeping its fingers on the pulse of new trends coming out of the continent. Bwana believes Nigerian street pop is the “next big thing,” as evidenced by Asake and Seyi Vibez’s success on the platform. The latter is the most streamed artist in Nigeria, accumulating 1.4 billion plays on Audiomack since 2020, while the former is a close second with 1.2 billion plays. To date, Asake’s 2023 album Work of Art is the most streamed Afrobeats album on the platform with 476 million plays, while his hit “Lonely at the Top” from the album is the most streamed Afrobeats song on Audiomack with 87 million plays.
“We have a lot of people achieving their first hundred thousand or million streams on Audiomack,” says Bwana. “[We’ve] accommodated both listeners and artists, and this is what really sets us apart from a lot of the other streaming platforms.”
In March, a Spotify account named Lucky Socks uploaded a sped-up version of Mark Ambor’s “Belong Together” to the platform. More than six weeks later, this jaunty take on the folksy original is still earning around 350,000 streams a day, and various high-speed versions of “Belong Together” have been used in more than 400,000 TikTok videos to date.
This is just the latest sign that sped-up remixes — often made at home by amateurs — drive both music discovery and streaming activity. “A big percentage of the population is engaging with music in this way,” says Ben Klein, president of Ambor’s label, Hundred Days Records. “If you’re an audio platform, you need to start allowing people to tap into that.”
That’s exactly what the platforms are doing. At the end of 2023, the streaming service Audiomack quietly rolled out Audiomod, a new set of tools that allow users to fiddle with tracks by changing the tempo, modifying the pitch, or swaddling them in reverb. In March, the company Hook announced that it had raised $3.5 million to further develop a platform that will help artists “monetize the use of fan-generated remixes on social media.” And in April, The Wall Street Journal reported that Spotify plans to introduce its own remixing tools.
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These initiatives signal a growing awareness that user remixes cannot be prevented — kids can make them easily on their phones. Since almost all of these reworks are unauthorized, labels and publishers will stand to gain if fans make and listen to remixes on streaming platforms where these can be paid out like a normal track. (“The next big forefront will be how we get paid for UGC,” Warner Chappell CEO/co-chair Guy Moot recently told Billboard, noting “the real challenge” of identifying all “those really sketchy sped-up versions.”)
And platforms can also benefit if new audio manipulation tools increase engagement or even attract additional users. “We think it can be a way to encourage more users to subscribe,” says Audiomack co-founder Dave Macli.
Audiomack Quarterly Uploads of Manipulated Songs
Courtesy of Audiomack
Creating new remixing capabilities will require the music industry to become comfortable with more flexible licensing agreements that legitimize what was previously a black-market activity — for fans, creating a remix at home without permission is fun; for labels, it’s technically copyright infringement. It remains unclear how artists will feel about labels sanctioning random reworks of their work, and whether listeners will connect with these homemade remixes when they’re not attached to addictive videos on TikTok or Instagram Reels.
While user remixes and edits are not a new phenomenon, there is a sense around the industry that this behavior — pushing a song’s tempo recklessly fast, or slathering the track in distortion — is especially dear to a new generation which sees altering music as a way of expressing fandom. Audiomack has found that “modders,” who alter more than 100 songs a month, are 50% more likely to be under the age of 20 relative to the average platform user.
“The younger users want to have some control over the sound on their own: ‘hey, what if we f—ed with this a little?’” says Tyler Blatchley, co-founder of the label Black 17 Media.
As a result, artists and labels often encourage fan remixing because it can be an effective promotional tool. At the same time, they frequently take down the unauthorized reworks that they find on major streaming services, because those divert money from artists’ pockets. Some acts release their own official sped-up or slowed versions to try to capitalize on the popularity of the form. (Audiomack data shows this trend really accelerated at the end of 2022.)
For the music industry, this patchwork system remains unsatisfactory. “There’s little visibility into what people are doing with the music, the artists don’t get to play a role in how their fans engage, and often they’re not getting paid for [the] consumption” of unofficial remixes, says Gaurav Sharma, the CEO of Hook.
Hook’s app, which recently launched a private beta, offers a more controlled environment for remixing activity, where users can select pre-cleared songs to manipulate and mash together. If a fan creates a new version they love — and, crucially, rightsholders have given permission — they will theoretically be allowed to export that alternate to other platforms when the app launches publicly later this year. In other words, a fully licensed and track-able remix or mash-up could be created on Hook and then go viral on a short-form video platform or in a video game.
While Audiomod allows users to play with tempo, distortion, and more, they cannot mash one song up with another or export their beloved remix to other platforms. They can share their preferred settings with friends, though, so pals can easily replicate their favorite mix. Plays of an altered version of a song on Audiomack will be paid out the same as plays of official recordings.
Audiomack has Merlin — the global digital licensing agency for the independent music industry — “signed up for this,” says co-founder Dave Macli. “We are in talks with the majors.”
At the moment, Spotify appears mostly to have a plan to create some remixing tools in the future. (A rep for the service declined to comment.) The company has been interested in figuring out ways to let users “play with and manipulate music” for years in contexts like a DJ set, according to a former executive. On top of that, “Spotify is trying to seize a lot of creator engagement moments, because TikTok is much more of an engagement platform.”
While The Wall Street Journal reported that Spotify does not yet have licensing agreements in place for remixing tools, the former exec believes labels “will be all-in for anything that increases plays and gets them a bigger share of the royalty pool.”
And labels do appear more open to sanctioning user manipulation of their audio recently. In December, for example, the video game Fortnite introduced a new musical experience called “Jam Stage,” which allows gamers to play music with their friends — but every person can be noodling on a different song, creating a strange, cacophonous mash-up in real (virtual) time.
The former Spotify exec believes the real obstacle to getting official remixing tools in place will come from artists being protective of their work. “What are [labels] permitted to do in their contracts with artists, and how will artists feel about it?” he asks.
At Audiomack, Macli says “we respect an artist’s decision if they don’t want to be a part of [allowing users to remix their songs]. But I think in a way you’re fighting the tide.”
Once platforms and labels sort out licensing, one big question remains: will users make and listen to sped-up remixes on streaming services without the enticement of a compelling visual trend or the possibility of going viral?
Audiomack users already appear to like sending around the tracks they pitch up or alter in other ways. “Over 9% of all shares on the platform are modifications of songs,” according to Macli.
Though Klein agrees that “there is an appetite for listening to sped-up stuff,” he believes “there’s a much smaller use case in that context.” “Sped-up sounds are really breaking through on audiovisual platforms” — especially TikTok, which has had a fraught relationship with the music business lately.
Still, Macli says, “the industry is going to have to lean into this one way or the other. They should lean into it as a tech problem that the DSPs should solve.”
Beats marketplace BeatStars signed a partnership deal with AI music startup Lemonaide that will make “ethically-sourced AI” available to music creators to help them write and produce new works. Lemonaide’s AI technology “purposefully generates short musical ideas to spark inspiration, push creative boundaries, and pull artists out of their creative slump,” according to a press release. The companies claim the AI is “trained exclusively on voluntarily contributed data from producers” to ensure proper compensation for and active participation by those whose musical works are used.
Music festival and live events promoter Insomniac and music and lifestyle brand Emo Nite announced a partnership that will encompass projects ranging from events to music to apparel. First up is the launch of Grave Rave, a new event series coming to Los Angeles in December that will feature “both legendary and emerging bands and DJs…fusing the sounds of electronic music with the melodies of the emo, pop-punk, and rock genres,” according to a press release. A preview party for the series will be held on August 26 at Insomniac’s Academy LA venue with a surprise lineup of DJs who “built their careers on pop-punk/alternative/emo influences,” the press release adds. The two companies have also teamed for the launch of a new record label, Graveboy Records, with forthcoming single releases by We The Kings, Say Anything and Noelle Sucks. The first collection of Insomniac x Emo Nite merch will also debut at HARD Summer 2023.
Atlanta-based record label and management company Love Renaissance (LVRN) will utilize music streaming and discovery platform Audiomack‘s proprietary ArtistRank system to discover and develop emerging musicians under a new partnership. According to a press release, ArtistRank “allows partners to identify better when an artist is building a lasting fanbase, differentiating itself from other analytical tools by emphasizing engagement metrics rather than solely through play growth.” It provides detailed analytics on fan demographics as well as predictive data that analyzes an artist’s potential growth trajectory.
NetEase Cloud Music formed a partnership with leading Chinese music and entertainment company RYCE Entertainment that will see the companies extend their previous agreement while also giving NetEase access to an expanded portfolio of RYCE’s music catalog in China, with 30-day initial launch rights to distribute new additions to the catalog. The companies will additionally team up to promote RYCE artists and music in China. RYCE’s catalog includes works by Jackson Wang, Amber Liu and Tablo, among many others.
NLess Entertainment co-founders Zach “Z-Bo” Randolph (a former NBA star) and Marcus “Head” Howell are leading a funding found for Connect Music Group, a Black-owned Memphis music company that offers tools and resources to help independent musicians build successful careers while retaining ownership of their masters. Along with fellow investor Richard W. Smith, CEO of airline and international at FedEx, Howell recently hosted an investor event to raise capital for Connect. The amount of the funding round is unknown.
MNRK partnered with New York industry workshop Steel Sessions — based in downtown recording studio The Engine Room — along with its producers Francis “Buda Da Future” Ubiera, Dan “Grandz Muzik” Garcia and Michael “Mike Kuz” Kuzoian. Under the deal, Ubiera, Garcia and Kuzoian will develop artists in the studio to eventually sign them to MNRK while also providing production services for MNRK Urban’s frontline releases, lo-fi instrumental albums, brand partnerships, soundtracks and artist synchs.
Deezer renewed its partnership with French telecoms provider Orange which was first struck in 2010. Under the deal, Orange customers will continue to have access to the Deezer streaming service. In celebration of the renewal, Deezer and Orange will offer six months of Deezer Premium for free to new customers who subscribe to a “Plus que forfait” plan.
Don McLennon, formerly of Brockhampton, has partnered with Nashville-based music tech company Artiphon to release his new track, “Halcyon,” exclusively via the company’s handheld smart instruments, Orba 2 and Chorda. Utilizing stems, Artiphon and McLennon will offer fans the ability to remix the track without any prior musical skill.
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