MMELY COMPLETES SPOTIFY FOR ARTISTS PROJECT

MBABANE – Antidote’s Mmely Hlandze’s hard work and dedication towards Spotify’s African marketing strategy has not gone unnoticed.

This comes after the co-founder of Antidote Music was chosen to partake in one of the rare opportunities of a lifetime where he got to work with one of the world’s leading streaming platforms, Spotify. Hlanze was granted an opportunity to be a part of the Mandela Washington Fellowship for Young African Leaders Initiative  (YALI) in the United States of America (USA) amongst nine other young leaders in the country. The Mandela Washington Fellowship for Young African Leaders is the flagship programme of the United States (U.S.) Government’s Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI). YALI was established in 2010 and celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2020. His involvement with Spotify came courtesy of the Mandela Washington Fellowship programme which he is currently a part of, together with other local young leaders who will fellowship together with nearly 700 other young African leaders for a six week virtual programme. Hlanze recently completed his programme where he was working with Spotify personnel from the USA through its Johannesburg headquarters.

Streaming

While working with the giant streaming platform, he created a marketing strategy for Spotify for Artists. This is a tool that helps artists have access over their profiles on Spotify and helps them grow their fan base and basically direct their career through different tools. Hlanze said this was an app or rather a value added service outside of Spotify which is specifically for artists and their teams. “Through this app, artists along with their teams are able to promote their music, insights on music performance, controlling their profiles on Spotify, pitching new releases to editorial teams and much more,” he said. He went on to add that the app was not fully integrated in Africa as it was introduced in February when they expanded in new African markets including Eswatini.

His involvement was basically to enhance this service among the Sub-Saharan Africa region, where he was developing a marketing strategy and in doing that, Hlanze said, “I had to analyse a lot of their tools and help them understand how they can help African artists and which tools they need. I basically focused specifically for Sub-Saharan Africa which includes the main markets in Ghana, South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria and Tanzania.” He, however, said there was nothing specific that he tailored for Eswatini but local artists could still use the platform nonetheless as his focus was merely on the major markets in the Sub-Saharan region.

Ground-breaking

Asked on how he felt about being the first liSwati to achieve this ground-breaking milestone, Hlanze said the greatest part of it was being able to add to the narrative of what the African music market can be. He went on to add, “This is a big deal for me as I felt very welcomed as my opinions were respected. They were so open and eager to learn from a guy coming from Eswatini. For me, the greatest part about this project is that one day I will see them rolling out their marketing strategies and I see some of my ideas being implemented and that would be the ultimate validation for me because that is in essence why I did it. “But more than that, it was more of making connections with the people I worked with including the team members from USA and South Africa. I learnt a lot and I am forever grateful for this opportunity.”

Development

When sought for comment, US Embassy’s Nanette said the fellows had recently completed their  Professional Development Experience (PDE) hence it would be amiss of her to comment any further as she was also currently in South Africa. She referred this reporter to the Embassy’s Public Affairs Officer, Stephanie Arnold but she could not be reached for a comment at the time of going for print. Spotify is a Swedish audio streaming and media services provider founded on April 23, 2006 by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon. It is the world’s largest music streaming service provider, with over 365 million monthly active users, including 165 million paying subscribers, as of June 2021.

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