Denis Opudo
Qisimah startup was founded by Ghanaian pair Kofi Aboagye-Akyea and Solomon Appier-Sign and South African Sakhile Xulu after a meeting during the MEST entrepreneurship training program in Accra. The startup is a monitoring platform that specializes in radio content. It, therefore, offers important stakeholders within the music industry with up to date data about their music. It shows who and where an artist song is being played allowing agencies to effectively collect royalties on behalf of their members and musicians to tell where their music is trending geographically.
Music award schemes are in a position to award nominees according to the current data, giving them validity. Research institutions can understand how music is taken by a group of people, by understanding which genres are trending in different regions of the world. Music executives are in a position to discover new talent by knowing which musicians are trending in different parts of the world. In addition to music licensed under traditional copyright, artists using Creative Commons licensing can track use of their content. This gives them the opportunity to develop relevant business models. Lastly, it helps the government enforce broadcast-related legislation and regulations.
Launched earlier this year, Qisimah was built at MEST since the founders having noticed the problem of getting data from radio in the past while working in the related media fields. The idea has been taken positively allowing the firm to get funding and was recently named one of the winners at the Global World Summit. The company is in talks with some organizations across Africa which will allow Qisimah to be operational in some markets. The various collaborations are to be announced soon by the firm that will help it in obtaining the set targets. The countries at the top of the list include Xulu’s native South Africa, as well as Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, Angola, Uganda, Rwanda, Senegal, Cameroon, Burundi, and Liberia.
According to Xulu, Africa is still at the starting stage of acquiring software, and many investors have not realized the presence of ripe opportunities within the continent. The main problem to Xulu is the pricing of their commodities given the fact that the markets have no background history on software buying. That means that they have to be keen on fixing prices so that they don’t instill fear in buyers.
