Founded by Ability Elijah, Light Nduka, Precious Opusunju, Peter Re’nobi, Musiccloud.com.ng is a platform dedicated to helping underground or upcoming musicians in Nigeria to get a voice and platform to reach their fans.
The platform allows the artists to upload their tracks and share with their followers and fans who can play the music and give the artists feedback or tell their friends about the new music.
Speaking to TechMoran, Elijah said, ” The free website is offered to every registered artiste as much as we are currently working on enabling artiste to add domain extension to their stage name. With MusicCloud, you can follow an actual artiste with your phone number and whenever he/she updates a new track it definitely will be updated immediately on your phone.”
The site allows users to upload up to 10MB tracks, allows unlimited music upload and the music is never deleted. The tracks have to be in MP3 and WAV formats only.
”No company is dedicated to help scale upcoming artistes in Nigeria. There are quite a numerous amount of artiste who aren’t buoyant enough to pay up to have their tracks online,” says Elijah. ”So we are taking up this responsibility to offer them a free service for a period of time.”
MusicCloud is a noble thing but it will need to spend a lot on technology and personnel to reach most of the underground artists in Nigeria and convince them that the platform is worth it. Another challenge is the fact that DJ’s and artists want to be paid for their work and not them paying to have their work hosted online. By allowing anyone to follow and get tracks from this artists for free-the pain of the artists to monetize is not solved but heightened further. MusicCloud’s success depends on how well it solves these problems.
Elijah adds that the firm will start charging N200 for 10MB in the near future but are at the moment focused on signing up artists. The firm will also have yearly charges for adding domain extension to website, audio adverts from private firms and introduce upcoming artistes to top Nigeria recording labels for a fee.
