Huawei, music vendors to accelerate digital economy in Africa
Huawei signed music cooperation contracts with global and local music vendors during the Huawei Southern Africa Partner Summit held at the Huawei Innovation & Experience Center in Johannesburg. The summit attracted over 40 industry partners.
Aimed at creating a sharing platform to promote digital collaboration in Africa, the summit witnessed Huawei’s efforts in leveraging its Digital inCloud, a software platform, to integrate content across music, video, gaming and other digital service genres of the likes to operators, so that more end users will be able to enjoy digital content at a convenient way. Partners from telecom operators, consultancy, service and content partners including Deloitte, Capasso, Mtech and Siphumelele Zondi as thought leader gathered at the summit. Huawei signed the music cooperation contracts with Spice Music, Mtech, CCA and other local music vendors, which marks a milestone of digitalization of music in Africa.
Under the global digital wave, Africa shows great demand for digital services, like music, game and video, etc. According to Huawei’s analysis, in 5 years, digital services’ year-on-year growth will be around 40%. However, there still remains a big gap between the growing damands and the digital productions. Wilson Feng, President of Huawei’s Carrier Business in Southern Africa Region, said, “Huawei is willing to work hand in hand with Africa partners to create a better industry ecosystem. We will leverage our innovative technologies of digital services, and our global resources to improve African consumers’ digital experience, and accelerate African’s digital economy development. Through the cooperation, Huawei’s digital business cloud will also help our partners in monetization, which means it’s a win-win solution for all parties in the ecosystem.”
The cooperation with content providers means that Huawei will have the copyrights of millions of latest music from the international and local vendors. This is Huawei’s first breakthrough into the global music space. Huawei will be able to provide the music and platform to telecom operators in South Africa, like Vodacom, MTN, Cell C, etc, and the operators can provide their music Apps to their end users. The end users can download the operators music App , such as MTN Music+, to listen or download the latest and most popular music.
At the Summmit, Mtech and Grafton, Huawei’s partners from Nigeria shared their successful case in the Nigerian music market– how they used the MTN Music+ platform to attract the users and monetize the music products. Praiz Adejo, one of the best musicians from Nigeria, also presented his story of attracting more fans through digitalizing his music through technologies from Huawei.
South Africa music copyright association Capasso, SABC, Deloitte, CMGE, MTN，CellC, Telkom also shared their opinions on how to develop the digital services in Africa.
Siphumelele Zondi, industry though leader, senior producer and anchor of SABC, said during his presentation at the summit: “There is a great need for local South African artists to venture into the digital space. Often local content is on demand but not available on digital platforms, which then promotes piracy. Africa is a mobile device intensive environment, and platforms such as Huawei’s Digital inCloud can aid the availability of local content to Africa.”
