Baya Ciamala works for one of the country's largest radio stations, Radio Okapi, as a presenter and producer, while also running Baziks, based in the DRC, on a part-time basis. As co-founder of the startup, his ambition is to support the structuring of the music industry in Africa, starting with the DRC, through streaming.
Can you tell us about your activities?
Launched in 2016, Baziks is both the global brand name of an app and the name of an African music tech startup. Based in Kinshasa, Baziks offers local music lovers the opportunity to listen to hundreds of thousands of tracks from the vast repertoire of Congolese and African music. Although the app was launched in 2016, Baziks Partners SAS, the parent company, has only been in existence since 2019 and has only been operational since 2021. We specialize in developing technological solutions tailored to the African music market. We organize and produce events and content. Finally, we publish digital platforms aimed at an audience of enthusiasts of African culture in general and Congolese culture in particular.
Can you tell us about BAZIKS?
Baziks' core business is streaming with a platform born out of a strong conviction: digital technology can play a key role in monetizing local music on a large scale, while improving the income of content creators such as artists, producers, publishers, and others. We were inspired by the success of Napster in 1999 and Myspace in 2003 for this project, but we didn't yet have the skills or resources to get started. It wasn't until 2012 that we created our mp3 music download blog, one of the first in the country. This blog enjoyed a certain amount of success beyond our borders. Thanks to this success, we were able to participate in major events such as AfricaCom in Cape Town in 2015 and the African Music Development Program in Ivory Coast in 2016 to exchange and share our experience.
During this marathon of events, we had already set our sights on streaming to keep up with the trend and rise of this new model. The first prototype was launched in 2016, and we were named winners of the Digital Lab Africa online music award in South Africa by a jury composed of giants in the music industry, such as TRACE TV and Believe Digital. Both entities subsequently chose to become mentors. Shortly afterwards, we developed a commercial version of our application, which was rolled out in the DRC in 2021.
To date, Baziks has been downloaded more than 15,000 times and has a dual business model: we offer a Freemium subscription that includes free access to all music via the app, financed by advertising, and we also offer a Premium subscription that allows our users to benefit from superior features such as offline access. Our positioning is unique and focused on the issues facing the African music industry. This year, we won the POESAM award (Orange Social Entrepreneur of the Year 2021) in the DRC. All these awards give us the faith and strength to continue believing in our project.
Why did you choose to launch such a service?
When we supported the emerging music scene in Kinshasa in early 2000, we realized that we had everything we needed to bring our talents to the fore: access to local and even international media, dedicated venues, hip hop artists on a par with the big stars of rumba… At the same time, there was a proliferation of home studios and 3D video clip production studios, but also, and above all, a real craze. We therefore chose to develop digital music distribution to make the commercialization of emerging music in the country a reality.
We entered the market early on as players in the French-speaking African space. And that gave us a few advantages. Today, the environment tends to be more mature. Our expertise and the rise of digital technology give us a lot of hope for the development and structuring of a music streaming industry on the continent.
What are your ambitions?
Today, there are a multitude of streaming platforms, and they all offer the same thing. We want to become the leading streaming platform 100% dedicated to local music, the continent, and the African diaspora. Our ambition is to contribute our existence and experience as Africans, to reclaim our cultures, to promote them while encouraging local production through local consumption on a local platform. And when I say local, I am referring to "Made in Africa." ." This should also contribute to the diversification of streaming offerings in an increasingly globalized world.
Can you give us an overview of your activities since Baziks was founded? Where are you today? What are your prospects for development?
The results have been positive. We started with an MP3 download blog and then launched a working prototype of a streaming app imagined and designed by Africans. For us, Baziks is the symbol of a dynamic and committed African youth on a continent that is on the move. We have made progress in terms of agreements with the collective management society for copyright and related rights, Socoda in the DRC, thanks to an initial agreement concluded in 2018. This has enabled us to enrich our catalog of premium content. We will now accelerate discussions with production and publishing companies as well as independent artists, particularly regarding the exploitation of their catalogs, in order to launch our offering on a large scale in the DRC. We hope to reach nearly 100,000,000 inhabitants, including 21,000,000 internet users.
At the same time, we are expanding into Central Africa, a market of around 163,495,000 inhabitants, with the support of the Gabonese ecosystem via the StartX 241 program run by Ogooué Labs and the Héméra accelerator (France, Bordeaux).
Our results are therefore positive at this stage, particularly in terms of networking, but the challenge remains to push for the widespread use of this innovation in a very short time frame.
What opportunities do you offer artists and music content creators?
We offer almost the same thing as all other platforms: remuneration proportional to the number of streams in a market that artists have struggled to control until now. We also support them in terms of visibility on our social networks, at events, and through professional connections.
We also try to encourage artists to become true music entrepreneurs. That means giving them the tools and skills to organize themselves as a label and control the phygital sale of their work to their fans via a subscription card system called Pass Miziki. In concrete terms, instead of settling for $1,500 for around 300,000 streams, an artist with 300,000 engaged fans on social media can earn nearly $268,200 per monthly subscription sold at $1.49, for example. We plan to evolve rapidly in tokenization to enable artists and content creators to improve their income.
Have you entered into strategic partnerships to develop your activities?
We have developed partnerships with players in the local ecosystem: first, there is FINTECH MaxiCash, with whom we are developing our Pass Miziki.
Finally, as the winner of POESAM 2021 in the DRC, Baziks benefits from a support package from the mobile operator Orange.
Francophone Africa is increasingly being courted by the majors in the music industry. What is your point of view? How do you imagine the development of the music industry on the continent? Particularly in a context of strong digital development?
The arrival of the majors is a very good thing for artists, creators, and the African music industry because it proves that the market is attractive on the one hand and that the majors can bring even more credibility to the sector on the other. In short, we consider platforms to be an extremely important advantage because the more we try to improve the quality of our services to attract audiences, the more the major labels trust us and can rely on us to reach our users. It is therefore only natural that we are open to win-win partnerships.