Audiomack is a cross-platform music streaming service, with such a wonderful website and app that grants everyone access to free mixtapes.
Founded in 2012, the app allows one to follow their favourite DJs, artistes, albums, and songs. What sets Audiomack apart from the likes of Datpiff and Live Mixtapes is that Audiomack gives music fans access to different musical genres. Asides from just Hip-hop and R&B, Audiomack features Naija Gospel, Afrobeats, Naija Hip-hop, Apala, Juju, Reggae, Highlife, and even Ajisari.
The music streaming platform has gone incredibly popular since its introduction to the Nigerian App Store; With a strong fan base and a 4.7-star rating from over 272,000 Nigerian users, it has easily shrugged off competition from the likes of Soundcloud, Apple Music and even Spotify in Nigeria. It has outranked its competitors and has consistently stayed on top spot as the No. 1 in the Music Charts.
What’s Wrong With Audiomack?
Audiomack, despite all its glittery accolades, is doing something potentially damaging to the same people that helped shaped its platform into a force to reckon with – The DJs.
DJs like Spinall, Neptune, Xclusive, Masterkraft, Jimmy Jat, Enimoney, OP Dot, to mention just a few, constitute a significant part of Audiomack’s Nigeria music streaming community.
Without these DJs, some artistes may have remained unknown and some forgotten. The music streaming community is an ecosystem of artistes, DJs and fans, but on a serious note, the role played by DJs on Audiomack’s music platform can not be ignored.
DJ OP Dot laments the lack of fair treatment shown to DJs and some upcoming artistes by the music streaming platform. “Audiomack deletes without warning or investigation, some mixtapes and collaborative audio releases that have received many hits — Some of which are nearing almost 1 Million streams.” He continued; “This hugely undermines the creative efforts of the DJs because it takes away the motivation and ginger to create new content.”
“Imagine waking up one day to see that your account is suspended, or your most grossing hit deleted for ‘copyright reasons’ — No warnings, no investigations, no removal requests, just automatic deletion. It is not fair. To make issues worse, they do not respond to queries or support tickets. Despite their huge popularity in Nigeria, they do not have an office in Africa, talk more of Nigeria.”
What Is The Way Forward?
“Audiomack can never understand our music industry more than us, and I think it is time for us to wake up to this maltreatment and create our own audio streaming platform. I strongly believe that this can be made possible by a collaboration between Investors, corporate bodies like GTBank (Who had earlier created Habari & uduX), Telcos like MTN, Airtel, Glo (To provide affordable streaming internet plans) and digital entrepreneurs like Azeez Makinde, (Founder of Naijaloaded).”
Nigeria, being the most populous country in Africa with a population of over 205 million, deserves something worthy of global recognition in the music technology space.
Access to these contents may then be monetized on a freemium pricing model and be made available to non-African countries as well, thereby serving as a form of foreign exchange to further strengthen our economy.
Do you support this motion? Let us have your opinion on this issue.
Much love from DJ OP Dot.
