- By?TechMoran
- November 24, 2012
Eric Wainaina,Musician
Musicians have a hard time monetising their online music sales but such days are numbered.
A new online music streaming and audio marketplace allowing people to pay and listen or download music online dubbed Waabeh is set to end this.
Waabeh, Nairobi slang for great or awesome . The name captures, what the platform aspires to be, a great platform, providing great and locally relevant audio content.
TechMoran caught up with Tim Rimbui, CEO Waabeh and he took us through their labour of love.
What does Waabeh literally do (to a layman)?
Waabeh, is the African Audio Marketplace. Waabeh is ?fully stocked with the freshest sounds coming out of Africa and is powered by the Internet, good vibes and mobile money; ?we are stocked with Music, Podcasts, Audio Books, Radio documentaries and Educational Material, basically anything that you will love to hear.
Currently Waabeh is available as a Web-based and Android application, and embed-able tracks whose delightful design takes the headache out discovering new as well as vintage African sounds and puts the focus back on what is important; discovery and hearing what you love.
We currently have over 500 tracks and the numbers keep growing daily. We have music from JustaBand, Eric Wainaina, as well as timeless tracks ?from , Mercy Myra, Five Alive, KSouth. We also have ?Jongo love? a 12 part ?fast paced drama set in grimy ghetto of ??Jongo? in Nairobi, as well as excerpts from the Kenyan Constitution
So far we have partnered with various musicians and content producers to make their music and content available on Waabeh, most recently Kisima for the first time this year ?streamed all the nominated music online. In partnership with Waabeh, Kisima ensured that listeners across the world listen to the music and engage with the various nominees online.
Further we partnered with Kevin Provoke to push his new single to over 200 people in one day. We currently have been working closely with the National Council of Kenya Law Reporting to provide the Kenyan Constitution in high quality audio format, which can already be found on Waaebeh.
Who is your competition?
We do not have much of a competition in terms of the quality ?and range of content we provide, the closest product we have seen in the market is mdundo, which helps musician distribute music via the internet. However, other than the diverse range of content found on Waabeh, we also provide high quality streaming service.
How unique are you from your competitors? What inspired you or your firm to launch Waabeh?
Currently there lacks effective solution for discovery and Distribution of African ?audio content. Music, Books, Podcasts.
The net result has been : Loss of revenue, piracy, invisibility for content creator, culture and creative ?industry suffers lags behind of the rest of the world?s, loss of jobs Lack of effective solution for distribution and discovery of African [Kenyan] ?audio content. Music, Books, Podcasts.
Take us through your different features?
Waabeh is an Audio content publisher that has two kinds of users, the audio consumer and the publishers.
For the consumer, our biggest offering is to be able to stream content through the various channels, Apps, Mobile Web, and Web. Our content is available in four main categories: Music, Life, Education and Soul. Music provides the best of African music, Life provides material that is meant to make life richer and fuller, here we have amongst other information the constitution of Kenya, Education provides Audio books, we are currently working at making available all current 8-4-4 set-books in drammatised audio format here. In Soul, we cater for the inner man, and here we provide church sermons and motivational talks.
In addition they can be able to download the content, depending on the publishing rights some of the content is available free for download e.g. the constitution, and the church sermons, while content like Music and books need to be paid for download. Based on our algorithms we are able to determine some of the most popular listened-to content, and we offer ?mix-tape of the week? to our ?users.
On the other hand we have the content publishers, for them, each has a way for creating their profile, where they can upload,manage their content and interact with their funs, and track how their work is doing through our unique and customised reputation management system that combines the power ?gota?, listenership and pageviews. ?In addition, we have studied the market and acknowledge that there is very little of locally relevant content easily available for distribution, therefore, ?for content publishers who do not have their work ?or would have their work in audio format, we offer recording services that guarantees high quality audio for downloading and streaming, which they can make available in all other mediums. We offer a feature that allows listeners to access content either directly from the Waabeh platform, but also within the publishers own website through an embeddable audio player streaming within the confines of their websites, as well as a badge.
Have you raised any seed funding or are bootstrapping?
Waabeh is a labor of love, fully bootstrapped and managed by the by the founders.
How do you want to make money out of Waabeh?
Waabeh currently has three revenue streams: Advertising, Streaming and downloads
Advertising
Our biggest source of revenue will be from Advertising. Unlike traditional advertising, All content will have creating and using custom made jingles with impressions ranging from 3 Seconds -15 Second Jingles in the middle of the content
Streaming
We will have premier content that we will charge a minimal fee to stream for given periods of time
Downloads
We will have some content that users could download for listening at own leisure
How do Musicians or the public benefit?
Waabeh is not only a music platform, but it also is place to listen to all kinds of audio content. It empowers the audio content creators by providing a platform that allows the distribution and monetization their content. Built in tools on the platform give detailed statistics about their content usage and their audience
In two years, what do you want to achieve?
This year we have done Kenya, in the next two quarters we will be working with musicians from Uganda and Rwanda , in two years time we want to be the go-to place for African and more specifically East African audio content
Who is on your management team?
The 4 person Waabeh team led by Tim Rimbui, an international music producer based in Kenya bring on board their solid reputations, stellar resum?s ?and a combined ?25 years in engineering , UI and system design, Music business, and branding.
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