FREE Music Downloads Now Available. Legally.

Yesterday, I put up a post about local artists’ latest windfall thanks to Mdundo.com. Did you read that? If you’re planning to be a musician, get these guys on speed dial. Fast!

Here’s a new development to this unfolding story. The Mdundo one I mean; they allow you to get your music free. Yes FREE. Did I say FREE? Mdundo had came up with this ingenious idea, that allows you to buy a scratch card, and voila, you can download music! Each song was priced at twenty buck, thus each scratch worth 100 shs gave you five songs. Now about that massive royalties piece, read about that here.

Last year, apart from selling the  cards at select outlets or during events, they also gave the artists to ‘peddle the wares’ themselves. The cards dished out to artists were in the millions, read about that here. This I think was so artists would have the opportunity to not only track their revenue, but no longer have that ‘I ran out of albums’ line. Ingenious. I, being excrable at math, didn’t get how Mdundo makes chumz koz the artists would keep 100% of the revenue.Oh well.

This year however, Mdundo has launched free legal downloads, the first entity in Africa. Consumers can now download a selection of music for free from mdundo.com. Mdundo has been working tirelessly with corporate sponsors and brands, that are interested in giving out music to Kenyans. Revenue will generated from these channels thorugh advertisements. This will be split among the artists.

One of the companies that Mdundo partnered with in 2013 was Samsung Electronics East Africa. Thus all customers who purchsed the new Galaxy Music handset, have been enjoying a five-day premium account from the portal:  http://mdundo.com/, allowing the customers to download all content for free and local artists to generate revenue from their talent. Kaching!