We’ve had a strong year here at Horus Music Africa, focused on educating, developing, and supporting our artists and those active in the wider African music industry. 2022 has been a year of change, growth and development and we’re well and truly ready to hit the ground running in 2023. We’ve had some major highs this year and are pleased to bring you are top highlights for 2022 along with some sneak previews of what 2023 will hold for Horus Music Nigeria.
Our focus on scouting, signing and supporting top and upcoming artists within Nigeria and the wider African market has been at the forefront of our success this year. We’ve signed some incredible artists including Singah, Benny Afroe, RCEE and Marley Abdul. With some exciting new signings in the pipeline for 2023, we’re delighted to give you a first look at our new signing, the incredible Barzini who we recently welcomed to the Horus Music Nigeria family. More info to come in the new year, so keep an eye on our monthly newsletter and social media for further details.
We’ve worked on some brilliant releases in 2022, from Ajimovoix Drums debut album ‘That Unserious Focus Boi (T.U.F.B)‘, to Duktor Sett’s record ‘Ducktor’s Appointment’ and Jlyricz latest single ‘Letting Go’, we’re extremely proud of our artists and strive to champion their music as much as possible. With this in mind, our team decided to launch a free playlisting service for every release to help give our artists an extra boost and utilise our direct partnerships with DSP’s. Our free playlisting service has proved exceptionally successful with our artists landing placement on editorial playlists across major DSP’s including Apple Music and Boomplay. If you’re interested in claiming your free playlisting for your next release, get in touch with our team.
Utilising our relationships across our different territories has been the key to success for several our artists in 2022. We launched our new collaboration service for our artists and labels clients to encourage our clients to create music with other artists across our international roster. This has proven to be particularly successful here in Nigeria with us championing two collaborations, the first between Ibejii & Afrikan Boy and the second, a more recent collab between Singah and Benny Afroe. Their track ‘You Know’ secured major wins across editorial playlists on Apple Music, Spotify and hit over 14 editorial playlists on Boomplay in 3 separate territories. The power of collaboration and cross continent marketing has been highlighted as a ticket to achieving great things as an independent artist in Nigeria and we look forward to continuing to support our artists and encouraging more collaborations in 2023.
One of our favourite releases from this year comes from Grammy award winning collective Morgan Heritage. We distributed their singles ‘Headline Fi Front Page’ and ‘We Like Dat’, securing serious marketing success, including playlisting.
Another project we are proud to be a part of is our artist and label services client Ajmovoix Drums, who not only signed to our sister company Anara Publishing this year but secured sync placement on Netflix film ‘Chief Daddy 2’. Ajimovoix continues to drop banger after banger and we can’t wait to continue to be a part of his journey in 2023.
Cementing our partnerships with key DSP’s is a strong focus for the team at Horus Music Nigeria and a great way to further these partnerships is introducing our artists to these industry heads, increasing opportunities for them including playlist placement and banners. We had a great day taking our artist Otega to visit the team at Audiomack and hope to be able to introduce more of our artists to key partners next year.
We believe education is the key to success within the modern music industry, so this year we made it our mission to host a series of workshops and seminars to help further our artists knowledge. We partnered with our sister company Anara Publishing to deliver a ‘Music Publishing Simplified’ workshop via our partners at Gramrphone, where we discussed educating independent Nigerian artists on music publishing and how it can work for them. We were delighted to be joined by Anara Publishing director Deborah Smith, our very own custom music tools artist Ajimovoix Drums and Jotam Matariro, the CEO at CAPASSO.
Following this successful workshop, we hosted a number of in-person sessions at Freedom Park Lagos, focussing on the impact of live events on music streaming with guest panellist Matthew Ohio. We later went on to present workshops on bridging the gap between Nigeria digital and live music, how the growth of the digital music market has affected live music in Nigeria, the application of local law, roles of networking and collaboration in partnership with Midem and the independent route to mainstream success. It was a great experience to share our knowledge and discuss these important topics with a diverse mix of panellists and we hope to bring you some more educational workshops both online and in-person during 2023.
2022 also saw the appointment of new staff for Horus Music Nigeria, with Valerie Ibiokoro joining us as Client Care Manager and Obinna Agwu as A&R Executive. You can connect with Valerie to discuss all things distribution and marketing your music, whilst Obinna will be handing onboarding new artists to the Horus Music Nigeria, securing new partnerships, and handling our artist advances.
We’d like to thank all our artists, labels, collaborators, partners and team for another successful year and we look forward to seeing what 2023 will bring for Horus Music Nigeria
