Gbedu Partners Eyowo, to Power Monetization for Artists

Royalty collection tops the list of challenges African Artists have to deal with after crossing the hurdles of Production, Distribution, and Promotions; this issue, which has become every Artists’ headache, is stopping them from adequately earning from their music.

Artists (and other creatives who own rights to a music material) are meant to earn value from their songs right from the moment it is streamed, played on the radio, or performed in a public place, but in the case of African Artists, these earnings either come in slowly or not at all. Some Artists and Managers have described Royalty as “a questionable sum that might be paid” to them but “most likely not”, due to several non-transparent reasons.

In the music industry in Africa, the bottleneck around collection can be traced to the excess number of middlemen (who can be distribution companies, an agency, or just an individual)  and their systems of collection. Most of these digital distribution channels only support PayPal for payments, which is not available in most African countries, and some still depend on the generation of reports in Excel Sheets, and manual tracking of streaming sources to arrive at a seemingly reasonable estimate of earnings for the Artists, in any case, money is lost or unclaimed. 

Gbedu has partnered with Eyowo - a progressive digital bank in Nigeria providing simple, modern, and reliable financial services to anyone with a phone number - to take away the problems of real-time earning, management, and access to earnings for Artists across Africa (starting with Nigeria). Gbedu and Eyowo are doing this by making it possible for Artists to create local bank accounts (using the last 10 digits of their phone number) right from within their Artists Dashboard on Gbedu. 

With this partnership, Gbedu can seamlessly pay due royalties, help Artists collect earnings from other integrated digital platforms (aggregated middlemen), and allow  Artists to be able to manage their earnings, locally (in local currency) and in real-time from their Dashboard. Gbedu is also exploring partnerships with offline collectors who are leveraging technology to exercise Performance Rights for music usage in public places and plans to support integration with these platforms which would allow Artists to be able to collect earnings directly to their Gbedu Eyowo bank account.

Artists are also able to use their Gbedu Eyowo bank account to carry out in-App transactions (such as Playlist Pitching), keep their money handy and perform banking-made-easy using Gbedu Eyowo Debit Cards and Eyowo USSD Service.

Eyowo is providing Artists with Financial Literacy and Finance Management resources, and will  be adding access to Credits and Creative Loans, in the coming months.