HARARE - Zimbabwe is joining Africa Unsigned, an online platform that takes African music to a whole new level. It links fans directly to musicians and leverages those relationships for the creation of new, well recorded, African music. Basically, the campaign empowers unsigned African artists to record music funded by fans. Music fans from all over the world can browse through artists on www.AfricaUnsigned.com. When they ?nd an artist they like, they can support the artist with a minimum of US$1. When US$10,000 is reached, the budget is used to make a professional recording of at least three songs.
The music is then distributed to the fans who backed the artist, and sold on all major online stores including Amazon and iTunes. All the generated net income from music sales is shared equally between the artists and the music fans who backed the recordings. Africa Unsigned is going live in December of 2009 with 25 up and coming artists from Kenya, Senegal, Mali, Zimbabwe and South Africa.