Nigeria: Josplay launches African Music Library

The initiative follows last year's launch of Josplay Enterprise, engineered to match African music with relevant audiences by harnessing AI technology and allowing users to create their own mood-perfect playlists using tags to search through an extensive catalogue of African songs. 

The digital platform indexes empirical and historical data about music made in Africa or by Africans in the diaspora, the company says. AML aims to collect, study and document the creators and participants of all recorded music in Africa or by Africans, cataloguing information about artists, bands, record labels, their works and how they are made, including instruments and genres.

The library is launching with data of over 3 000 artists and more than 10 million data points on recorded musical works. It also tracks more than 100 genres spanning different generations.

According to AML’s founders, the motivation behind the initiative stems from the lack of a unified source of knowledge and data around music from the continent.

“The library’s information repository ranges from music credits that document who did what on any piece of recorded music to the detailed audio analysis of these works,” Josplay co-founder and CEO Emmanuel Ogala said, adding that AML is the result of three years of work.

“The problems we solve with the African Music Library are crucial for proper classification of music, the assignment of appropriate credits and royalty distribution across the industry,” Josplay co-founder and chief operating officer Jideofor Okoro said.

“African music is too rich to be sidestepped as ‘world music’. We have over 200 genres in African music with various abilities to evoke a broad range of emotions for different groups of listeners. These genres deserve to be studied, preserved and codified for maximum participation in the digital economy.”

The co-founders of Josplay foresee a future where Africans will be considered priority consumers of music, media and information. The company’s efforts are geared towards building a data foundation for sound engineers, researchers and musicologists, among others, who are key players in the forging of tomorrow’s African music industry.

“We want innovators in the African music space to have the data needed to build applications that can satisfy every African with their natural taste in music,” Ogala said.

The library is open to the public and welcomes everyone in the African music space to explore, contribute and share music data from the continent and diaspora. 

Access the African Music Library here.