Zikify – 5 Ugandans Bringing African Music Online

And when it comes to building a platform for streaming music, their home country Uganda is not a bad place to start from. Uganda has a very young population- with its 33.3 million people and with a median age of 15 years. Typically to other Sub Saharan countries the number of (mobile) internet subscribers is exploding.

We asked David Madra, a developer and a music fan, about how Zikify plans to change the East African online music scene. By the way, as a big music lover himself, David used to write rap songs as a youngster, but as he puts it himself: “then I fell in love with computers and the rest is history”.
The team of Zikify consists of him and 4 more guys from Kampala who have worked together on various website and mobile projects also before (see photo).

How did you come up with the idea?
The idea come to me over time, we realised how hard it was to get African music online plus all the other music streaming services where either only available in USA and Europe or had no African music so we decided to build a service for Africa by Africans and give everyone the choice to access high quality DRM free African music online.

What is special in the world of music and web in Africa?
All music in the world borrows its rythm from African music. Our music is the mother of all music, be it jazz, soul, rock or hiphop. At Zikify we know that African artists don’t get the recognition and rewards they deserve from their music and we intend to change that.

Do you have competitors equivalent to European or US sites, if any?
Our closest competitor comes from Nigeria namely iroking.com and spinlet.com, we are however approaching this problem differently, we are not building for the top end of the population but are targeting the bottom of the pyramid first.

How many Ugandans have access to broadband, are they able to use your service?
First off, at Zikify we provide a solutions for both low speed and high speed internet situations, we are also building solutions for mobile web, Android and J2ME apps and for feature phones without internet access (something we like to get M-Ziki). That said Uganda’s and East Africa’s broadband usage is exploding and at Zikify we are building a music streaming service for the estimated 9 million internet subscribers in the country.

What’s your business model?
Our business model is pretty straight-forward:
- Premium subscriptions. Our premium subscribers will have access to an add free website and other perks;

- Cut from the music sales. We shall also get a cut from the album sales that go on on the website

- Advertising revenue

Are you planning to conquer also other continents?

First we plan on conquering East Africa then the world, we need to make three things happen.
We need to make it possible for our customers to listen to their music anywhere on any device with relative ease, at Zikify we build for our users.
The second thing we need to is create a platform that the artists will feel is beneficial to them, we want to benefit the artists not only financially but also give them more exposure and create a market where there is virtually none. The competitors on the other continents will simply not have the catalog that we do, the kind of content we provide will be unique to Zikify.

And last, is there any African musicians we should be keeping an eye on?
Unfortunately due to ongoing talks I am not at liberty to disclose any names, all you have to know is you will be surprised at how we are going to approach this. Just keep following us on HumanIPO.

To follow Davids’ suggestion and to follow the development of Zikify, go on their HumanIPO profile here.