I bought my first MP3 album of music by a Kenyan from Amazon; Mtaa Mentality by Julianni. It is a fantastic album and at $6.99 was a great deal. Now truth be told I already had a bootleg version of the album. This had allowed me to 'preview' the album which I would describe as rap and hip hop with urban lyrics in Kiswahili, Sheng and English. I had not heard of Julianna before I was given a copy of his album.
I found Julianni's music on Amazon after I stumbled upon a story on a blog that Atemi Oyungu had signed up with Gatwich Records of the UK. When I found the Gatwich Records website I was pleasantly surprised to see that Julianni's music is available on Amazon (and iTunes).
There are more than 290 other music albums by Kenyans available on Amazon; a wide range of genre's, ranging from traditional to gospel and in many languages. It is great to see Kenyan musicians using the Amazon platform to sell their music to Kenyan's all around the world, and other people interested in Kenyan music.
Kenyan musicians need to do a better job of promoting their music, especially using websites, blogs and social media like FaceBook and Twitter to let the huge market of Kenyans in the diaspora know the music is available online at Amazon and iTunes. My plan was to buy the Mtaa Mentality album on my next trip to Kenya, I was not aware it was available online.
Just a Band, who achieved massive fame with Makmende, a character on the song Ha-he on the new album 82, is available for sale on the Just a Band website and also on iTunes. It was also supposed to be available for sale on Amazon on April 13, 2010 but it is not ready for download there yet, you can however preview the songs. Just a Band achieved mega success at letting people know about Makmende using Twitter and FaceBook. It will be interesting to see if they can leverage the massive popularity of Makmende to realize great sales.
There are great lessons, positive and negative, that Kenyan musicians can learn from Just a Band!
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