Last month, we launched the Music – Tech Innovation Challenge in partnership with Music + Tech Space to find and support the development of tech-focused solutions across 4 thematic areas in Nigeria’s music industry. These areas are the digitization of music label operations, artist management, legal advisory for artists, and event management. 

Today, we are happy to announce 12 shortlisted ideas and solutions from across the country:

• Tix.Africa – Tix Africa is a self-service ticketing platform for event creators that allows people to create, share, and collect payments for live or virtual events. 
• Fresible Music – Fresible Music is a digital music distribution platform that allows artists to sell their songs and collect royalties on Spotify, Deezer, Apple Music, Boomplay, and over 90+ music streaming platforms.
• Royalti.io – Royalti.io helps independent artists and labels earn and keep track of royalties generated from their digital music and videos.
• Joo247 – Joo247 is an indigenous music streaming platform. They currently help artists collect revenue from over 8 African countries
• GiGs – GiGs helps Artist Managers actively manage their talents’ schedules, bookings, video shoots, and other aspects of their career through a simplified dashboard
• Lomi – Lomi is a talent booking and event ticketing app that connects music-loving audiences and brands
• CoShots – A social cloud application that helps artists share exclusive content with their fans
• TheContractAid – is an online legal advisory platform that allows artists to get access to quick and affordable legal services
• Smart Music – Artificial intelligence platform that provides general legal advisory services and consultations as well as contract reviewing for upcoming artists. 
• MusicLegal –  a virtual marketplace that connects artists with legal professionals
• The Music Learning Cap – is an e-learning platform that provides development training programs for upcoming artist managers
• Loyalty & Gift Card Solution – provides event managers with “loyalty cards” that allows them to manage and monitor payments within event spaces
• Music Hangout – Music Hangout is an online music streaming platform that promotes African indigenous music talents, solving the problem faced by artists that find it hard to showcase their creativity to the outside world and monetize their music production.

On December 2nd, these 12 finalists will be pitching their solutions and ideas before a panel of experts including Bez Idakula, Audu Maikori, Ms. Uduak Oduok, Wale Davies, and Godwin Tom. The four* winners chosen will participate in a 3-month incubation support program where they will receive:

1. Technical support to build or finetune their solutions, 
2. Access to top organizations within the industry as customers (Chocolate City Group, Palmwine Music Festival, iManage Africa Entertainment, MusicTechSpace, Africa Music Law, and more).
3. Potential funding from music industry experts and/or CcHUB’s syndicate investment fund
4. Access to Paga’s suite of payment APIs to deploy in their solution

*To build an active community of patrons that are excited about testing and using these solutions, the general public will have an opportunity to vote for their favourite solution to determine the “Audience favourite”. The solution with the most audience votes will automatically be chosen as one of the winners of the challenge. You can vote for your favourite solution here before the December 2nd deadline. 

Vote now: https://musictechspace.com/challenge/vote.html