Can you tell us about Boomplay Music's activities?
Boomplay Music is a music streaming app that currently offers more than 80 million tracks with both freemium and premium models. The app is used in most countries on the African continent.
On June 9, we opened our offices in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. It is officially the first French-speaking country to benefit from the platform, although there is a small presence in Cameroon.
What is Boomplay's model?
The Boomplay offering includes advertising, and in return, we can offer free music streaming to users. This gives them the opportunity to listen to all their favorite tracks on the platform. On the premium side, Boomplay offers the same services but with additional benefits such as better sound quality, greater listening capacity, and the ability to listen to tracks without using data.
Why did you choose to set up in Côte d'Ivoire?
Even before officially opening our local offices, we had already built up a pool of users in Côte d'Ivoire. This is partly why we chose to establish a more permanent presence there and to have local representation.
What are your ambitions?
Our ambitions will mainly focus on developing our activities, but also on educating people about music streaming, as this is not yet ingrained in people's habits. Our priorities are to build close relationships with our partners, distributors, aggregators, as well as artists and labels.
We therefore need to educate people about our activities, but also about what we are doing to help artists optimize their presence on the platform.
Then we also have work to do at the user level. We are in a market which, like many African markets, is still rife with piracy and illegal downloading. We need to gradually redirect users towards legal and, for the most part, free music consumption. In a second phase, we will of course develop other channels, particularly the freemium model, as well as structural partnerships with mobile phone operators. This is necessary, even essential, because we share these revenues with the artists, so we need to tap into other sources to diversify.
Finally, I hope we can contribute to the structuring of the local music industry. We are in a strategic position to do this because we are located between the artist and the audience. We therefore want to help formalize this relationship.
The music streaming industry is growing rapidly on the continent. How do you plan to stand out?
We will do so in two ways. First, we have been on the African continent since 2016, so we have experience in these markets. Our presence has given us a better understanding of the end user as well as the needs of artists. We can also count on our large catalog of titles because we have relationships with both major record labels and independent African labels. In addition, we have built teams in several countries to curate titles and promote emerging artists. We make it a point of honor to give visibility to developing artists.
We now have access to data that allows us to understand the market and our users. We make this information available to artists and record labels so that they can better develop their strategies. For example, we know that users in Côte d'Ivoire are predominantly male, aged between 15 and 30, located in large or medium-sized cities, and listen for 83 minutes per day.
What are your development prospects?
In the medium term, we are observing and "monitoring" other countries in the French-speaking zone. Essentially Senegal and the DRC, which are two major countries in this field. There are also Mali and Burkina Faso. For the moment, we are focusing on developing our activities in Côte d'Ivoire, which is a stronghold in this field. We are going to take the time to develop our audience and our relationships with local artists there.