African streaming service Boomplay’s latest licensing deal is with indie-agency Merlin.
The company already had a full set of deals with the global major-labels, as well as a catalogue of music from African labels and artists. “Boomplay’s vision is to build the largest and most reliable music ecosystem in Africa, and working with Merlin brings us significantly closer to that goal,” said Tosin Sorinola, Boomplay’s head of marketing for Africa.
How is that ecosystem growing, though? In August, we reported Boomplay’s announcement that it now had 53 million users, up from 42 million in April. Now the figure has grown again.
In its press release about the deal, Merlin stated that Boomplay now has 62 million users, which suggests it has grown its number of listeners by nearly 50% in nine months. The usual ‘are those active users or registered users?’ caveat applies, however. Boomplay also raised $20m of new funding in April this year.
Having key indies as well as all three majors on the service is obviously going to capitalise on its highly impressive growth this year. It is, however, facing competition from not only local services such as uduX, telco MTN’s MusicTime, Smubu, Playfre, Naijatastic and TrackDrip but also from YouTube which is putting its weight behind local artists in order to get a foothold across multiple African markets.
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