Imagine being one of the first music producers in the United States to dominate social media. Imagine being one of the first people in The Netherlands to be followed by hundreds of thousands of people. You’d be a legend. You’d be one of the most influential people in the entire country. Now, imagine influence multiplied by 54. This is the opportunity currently available to you as a producer if you are able to utilize social media properly. During this article, we’re going to be discussing why you should be focusing on Africa as a place to grow your music.
Many continents around the world have already experienced a massive social media boom. With several hundred active monthly users in North America alone, it comes as no surprise to learn that social media advertising is one of the most effective ways in 2019 to establish your artist presence on a global basis. Platforms such as WeChat, Snapchat, Whatsapp and more have taken over the entire planet with the power to communicate with potentially billions of people. But with the ability to literally target people by their specific interests to attract them to your music, Facebook is undoubtedly one of the most underutilized tools on the planet. Take advantage of it.
Over the past few years, Mark Zuckerberg has managed to sign up over half the countries within Africa to the social media networking site. With a total population of over 600 million to date on the platform, it quite frankly ridiculous not to put your online presence in a continent that holds such a substantial amount of people. Due to Facebook providing free internet to the region, it has quickly managed to grow the user base at an exponential rate. Describing it as a “basic human right”, Zuckerberg wants to connect the entire planet with one-another around the world. To give you an idea of how large the opportunity truly is, it is estimated that there will be approximately 700 million active smartphones In sub-Saharan Africa by 2020. To put things into perspective, that’s a larger market than all of the countries in North America combined.
Additionally, China’s Belt and Road initiative which provides funding & infrastructure for the continent to become more developed is laying the foundations for multiple thriving economies over the coming decades. Some of the countries included are Kenya, Ethiopia, Egypt, Tanzania & several more. As well as providing significant funding into the economies, the large investments that China is making ultimately proves that Africa is a continent with a lot of untapped potentials.
It’s no secret that the majority of consumers in the continent are unable to pay large fees of thousands of dollars for production courses etc due to economic clients. However, for anybody genuinely serious about their music career – that won’t be a problem. This is because they realize that dollars follow attention. If you are able to make yourself one of the most high-profile people within the music industry in Africa, people from all around the world will literally be prepared to pay you thousands (possibly hundreds of thousands) of dollars for sponsorship, and collaboration offers to become cultural ambassadors – just research the likes of Akon if you need an example of the respect you get if you have a strong African fan base. Plus, a show at the Pyramids of Giza would be pretty awesome.
People within the continent have been using mobile phones for decades. As a great way to communicate with friends & family within their local area (and abroad), it comes as no surprise to learn that the population is now looking for ways to communicate in a way that rivals the rest of the world. With very minimal desktop units, they are essentially leading the global shift towards mobile-only internet use. After all, it is only a matter of time before the rest of the world follows suit & realizes that mobile device viewing experiences are the future of the internet (at least for the next few years).
So how can you go about being one of the primary influencers within the electronic music industry on the African continent? The short answer is to run Facebook & Instagram ads against people with an interest in EDM that lives within Africa. By doing this, you’d be growing your fanbase at exponential rates – and thus leading the global change. At the time of writing, it costs approximately $150 USD to grow a fan base of 10k people in the African content. That is, if you are good at targeting & have a great understanding of consumer psychology to get a high conversion rate. In comparison, it costs roughly $1850 to grow the same audience in the United States Of America.
Also, you could look at the Spotify & Apple charts within each country in order to understand the psychology of what genres of music the population within a certain location likes. Then, you could potentially organize collaborations of the two styles, featuring industry influencers in Africa, in order to establish an even stronger cultural presence on the continent.
Take advantage of this incredible opportunity whilst you can & seize the moment. Realize that if people in Africa aren’t listening to your music, it is literally guaranteed they’ll be listening to someone else. And so for the sake of the electronic music industry, we hope that you are able to make the right decision to benefit both the people of Africa, and your artistic brand as an EDM producer.