emPawa Africa is an African music company & service provider set up to create, acquire, licence & monetize African music globally.
Over 90% of African artists are independent / not signed to any music Label. In comparison, 67% of artists in Europe and America are signed to record labels. The emPawa model is not to act as a label but rather to licence, invest, develop and distribute music and collect payments for artists IP income globally.
The company CEO is Mr Eazi. Nigerian-born global afrobeat star with over 6.5 million monthly global listeners, amassing over 1 billion streams in 4 years. He has built a local African team that has unique insight into the African music and understands the music culture which gives a huge advantage over the big international labels who do not have the required local insight and relationships both in the industry and the regulatory level to operate at the emPawa Level. With the global music culture shifting, representing and developing artists is a matter of trust and which requires a non-traditional model of music investment. emPawa is a company built by an artist with an artist-first mindset which has helped build models that defy the current label operations culture including non-ownership of masters, earnings advance model and earnings transparency which is very important to African Artists and building trust.
The Global Annual 2020 annual digital revenue from African music is estimated to be $120 million and is forecast to grow at 13% CAGR annually (PwC Entertainment & Media Outlook). 95% of that revenue is export, being driven by Afrobeat’s popularity internationally.
emPawa Africa operates with multiple revenue streams to help artist monetise their work: