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DELE KADIRI, MD Boomplay NIGERIA
Dele Kadiri is the General Manager of Boomplay, Africa’s largest music streaming platform. With years of experience in the media, his works have stood the test of time and this has given him an edge over his contemporaries.
He is deeply rooted in advertising and sales. He has over 13 years of sales and brand partnership experience with a focus on new business development. He is a lover of good music.
He once said that he is grateful for having the opportunity to work with national brands on campaigns aligned with entertainment, news, sports, music, and culture.
A few days back, City People Journalist, BENPRINCE EZEH (08068599879), met with him at an event and he spoke on how Boomplay became the most streamed music app in Africa. Below is the excerpt from the chat.
You were saying something inside, for how long has Boomplay been in Nigeria and in existence itself?
We started in Nigeria first, and we have been in Nigeria for the past 7 years.
Just tell us about Boomplay?
Boomplay is a music streaming platform where content owners can bring their music on the platform, then we distribute it to everybody globally. Boomplay has 95 million active users on a monthly basis in Africa, I mean globally making it the most streamed. So Nigeria has 17 to 20 million active users. We are the biggest streaming platform in Africa right now. The company is a part of Transsnet Holdings. Transsnet is the owner of Tecno, Infinix, and Itel phones and NetEase, a Chinese internet technology company. So we are a Sister company. Transsnet is the mother company, we came out of Transsnet, so our company is called Transsnet Music Limited.
When you say Boomplay is the biggest streaming app in Africa, how certain are you?
We have the numbers; numbers do not lie. We are Sara driven company. We have a backend whereby we see the numbers of people streaming.
The Estimate here in Africa we are like 95 million, globally we are 95 million let me not say Africa alone. So we have monthly actives of 93 million, content providers of 4000+, we have a library of 100 million plus. So those are the information.
Did it actually start in Nigeria first?
Yes, Boomplay started in Nigeria first.
Who initiated the plan to start it up?
So music streaming has been existing for a while now, I mean we are one of the first that pioneered music streaming in Africa. So music streaming has been in existence globally all over the world so we just found avenues where people can easily consume music and where people can easily listen to music, that is the idea. I mean the likes of when you go to Alaba and you buy CDs, let’s say you are a musician now, someone will come and mass produce your CD and be selling, so you are not making money. So we want an avenue where content owners can make money for their work, not someone else taking their work and making money from their sweat. So that is the idea whereby content owners can make money from there and also have a better life for themselves.
How do you put the music of three decades on the app?
In the beginning, we bought the CDs and we Reaped them and uploaded them, but right now we have content owners who will send us their releases ahead before they release them to everybody. We will release it and help them to promote it, so we have content partners globally, we work with Sony, we work with Universal, we work with Warner Music, we work with all music platforms globally and also we work with local partners as well, all those that do music locally we work with them. So there is no music that is out there that we don’t have.
Some people say they don’t get music that was sung as early as the 70s.
So if you go to Boomplay, songs that are sung in the 70s are there.
In the beginning, those are the works we did. We put a lot of work into it. We go and meet the families of those artists and get their catalogs from them, and that was the genesis from the beginning. From Alaba, we meet with the artist directly, for those that are dead, we meet their family, get their content from them, and post it.
Most streamers say they go to Boomplay and they get an advert, play this, play that, so some can get turned off by that, how do people tend to stop that and retain the user?
So the idea is we are running different models, we have what we call freemium and premium. So what I mean by freemium is you log into Boomplay you can play any music for free, so with that one, we need to inconvenience you in a way, like we are giving you the music for free. So if you are running an Ad, we are making money from that. But if you don’t want to see the ads, you can move to premium, whereby you subscribe for a month.
So that means the Ads that pop up, are an intentional act by your company, for you people to make money and share with the artist as well?
So there is some music you try to play or download from Boomplay that freemium, it will tell You to subscribe. This music is not available for freemium, they are available under premium.
Why?
Because the owner of the content wants people to pay for his music that is why he put it on premium. He doesn’t want people to consume the music for free so mostly big artists are the ones doing that. So it’s like you are buying CDs before you listen to it.
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