JosPlay, a Nigerian-owned African music streaming app and library, has emerged as the highest paying music streaming platform on the continent.
This was revealed during a LEADERSHIP Weekend interview with the platform’s new Artiste Acquisition and Marketing Lead, Bemigho Blessing Tenumah.
According to Tenumah, apart from Jay-Z’s Tidal, JosPlay offers better payouts to music artistes than any other streaming service in Africa.
In April, Nigerian artiste Burna Boy highlighted the lack of financial reward for artistes despite racking up thousands or even millions of streams in Nigeria.
Addressing this concern, Bemigho Blessing Tenumah, JosPlay’s Artiste Acquisition and Marketing Lead, explained that the platform’s “Pay As You Stream” model allows artistes to earn an average of $0.014 per stream.
“We pay higher than any other platform out there,” Tenumah said. “At the moment, the only platform with a slightly higher payout than us is Tidal. We recognise that most traditional music streaming platforms don’t favour African artistes. That’s why JosPlay is different.
We’ve heard the complaints about low earnings, but on JosPlay, a million streams actually mean something. With good marketing, access to the right audience, and a strong fanbase, artistes can earn significantly more here than they would on traditional platforms.”
Tenumah attributed JosPlay’s success to its core mission: bridging the gap between artistes and their audience, connecting underground talents with listeners, and ensuring artistes are fairly compensated for their work.
“We are an artiste-first-centric platform. We’re not just building a service for artistes—we’re building relationships with them,” she said.
She emphasised that maintaining strong relationships with artistes is just as important as discovering and onboarding their music.
In her role as Artiste Acquisition and Marketing Lead, Tenumah focuses on scouting talent and catalogues, collaborating with artistes and their teams—whether managers, labels, or distributors—to help them navigate the platform, amplify their releases across Africa and beyond, and support them in achieving their creative and career goals.
“Maintaining relationships with our artistes and their team is most important, because without that, they won’t maximize the platform, and then, they will feel your platform is not adequately supportive of their craft. We support artistes, no matter what their numbers or strings are. This is the essence of being the marketing lead. Whatever the artistes’ issues relating to marketing, song releases etc., they come to me for solutions. We also find new ways to open new markets to them to expand their reach across Africa and beyond,” averred Tenumah.
A graduate of Computer Science, the Delta native knew she wanted to be an artiste manager, whilst in secondary school. The love for the industry stemmed from music studio rehearsals and experiences she had at the Paulson British International School, Benin, Edo State, where she encountered lots of Nigerian actors and actresses who trooped in and out of the proprietor’s movie academy.
Thus, she began early in her career working many jobs and upskilling herself whilst in university (Novena University).
She started out writing for music blogs, to owning her own music download site. While in university, she applied for Audio Mack scholarship which payed for a course on Artiste Management and Marketing with the Music Business Academy for Africa (MBA for Africa). Post the course, she began managing her first artiste in 2022, learning on-the-job. Prior to working as the Head of Content for the music company, Pitch Clerk, she underwent a three-to-six internship with touring company Toorly.
“I figured I should know more about touring, as it would come up soon in my career, once my artiste catches a break. I learnt a lot from Toorly.”
She left Pitch Clerk for her current position at JosPlay.
Acknowledging the tough part, she has had to follow, Tenumah said, “It wasn’t easy. I got most of my working experience while in school. So, I was working, managing an artiste and studying. There were times I wanted to give up, but I told myself – “you enjoy doing this. That is the reason you do it.” Working in the music industry makes me happy. People say to me, you know what you want. I think I dabbled into a lot of things but it was music that clicked for me.”
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