By Ntambi Jimsal
Uganda music industry is declining faster on digital platforms more especially on Spotify which brings a lot of questions to the stakeholders more especially the musicians, distributors , record labels , promoters and artists managers .
Few years the industry growth on streaming platforms was promising more especially during Covid times and many thought Ugandans music consumers have adopted the streaming culture and very many artists were excited and also started bragging about it which even forced many artists to drop albums while targeting online market but unfortunately the situation has turned their hopes down .
Artists like Sheebah , Martha Mukisa , Eddy Kenzo , Pallaso , Karole Kasita , Azawi , Zex Bilangi, Zuli Tumz and many more dropped albums hoping they will get a chance to improve on their streams on digital platforms such that they can earn some money and also increase on their online listeners but unfortunately it seems all albums flopped which led them to focus on their singles .
Artists like Sheebah and Eddy Kenzo were the kings and queens of streams in Uganda but apparently there numbers have dropped at a very high speed which has brought so many questions to us .
- Do we have quality music in Uganda?
- Do Ugandans really adopted the culture of streaming music online or they still download it?
- Should we say foreign music is too good to be streamed compared to Ugandans if yes what should the industry do ?
- Ugandans don’t stream music because of data since it’s expensive ?
According to my research , the numbers of listeners of Ugandan artists on Spotify has dropped from 300k to 130k and apparently is Joshua Barrack topping chats on this this app with 300k listeners but the rest are struggling.
The total number of listeners on digital platforms are dropping every other day which keeps us worrying.
We shall bring more about this information.