Comparing artistes’ profits from Selar with iTunes, Apple music, Spotify, Boomplay
Artists make the most profit selling their music on Selar
Before I dive right into the details of our survey, what is Selar?
Selar is the best way to sell. If I am to be more descriptive, I’d say; Selar is a platform that enables creators, entrepreneurs & artists to sell their digital or physical products in multi-currency, and they get their profits straight to their bank account or mobile money.
What we’ve done thus far is, create this very simple platform where a creator can signup, create a profile, and start selling almost anything in less than 3 minutes.
Anything in this case ranges from any downloadable content(music, movies, books, magazines), event/training tickets, subscription plans, streaming platform, e.t.c
We’ve grown to over 5K users in such a short time (depending on what’s short to you. lol). You know you’re doing something right when your customers are your biggest advertisers and marketers. We take pride in being an instrument for creators & artists to make the most profit selling online, and we really hope to keep doing this more efficiently for years to come.
Survey background
We decided to take this survey because, whenever I personally approached some artists to sell their music via Selar, I always explained to them that it was just the logical thing to do — you’d make more money off Selar — to me the idea was simple; a good number of your fans/supporters are local supporters, even the big names in the industry can’t deny this. Yes, you have international fans, but they’re in no way compared to number of your local supporters in most cases, and it doesn’t make sense to make your music available on platforms that are not easily accessible to the majority of your fans and supporters.
I use Apple Music today, most of my friends use either Apple Music & Spotify too, so this is not a question of if Nigerians are not on these platforms, but that the majority of willing buyers aren’t, and why exclude the majority from the sales cycle? I really believe the digital products buying power of Nigerians or Africans in general has improved over the years, but most people are still working with the assumption that we don’t buy music. While the music industry is plagued with many woes when it comes to music sales, I’d love to think one of them is Accessibility; I have a lot to say about accessibility, but that would be a post for another day. I will say this though, remember the time M.I released an album and he sold in banks? News was, all the copies sold out in no time, that’s accessibility; right place, right format, and right price.
Quite frankly, I know music sales is not the main source of income for most artists, I’m just tired of the narrative that local fans and supporters don’t buy music.
Survey Participants
For this survey, we reached out to some of the top selling artists on Selar that also have their music on other platforms, and asked them to make a comparison of the profit accrued from album and single sales on Selar vs the corresponding profit they got from those other platforms like iTunes, Spotify, Apple Music & Boomplay.
Some of the artists used for the survey are: Ric Hassani, Alpha, Outburst Music Group, Boogey, Vader, Mon Lee, PayBac, Ten Tik.
Survey Data:
For the sake of brevity, we will only show data for 2 singles, and 3 albums in the survey.
There are so many things I’d like to pick from the results above, but I would start with accountability and visibility; something common amongst some of the requests for data we made from these artists was the inability to access up-to-date data of their sales. Some of the music aggregator platforms that put their music on all these other platforms don’t offer realtime or detailed record of their profits.
Piggybacking on accessibility, accessibility also means: why buy at $15 or more on iTunes when you can buy the Alaba CD at your local record store for a whole lot less?
Another contributing factor is the profit split ratio with these other platforms, if there’s anything I’ve always said from the get go, it’s that we’re committed to giving artists & creators the most profit possible and that’s why we charge only about 4% for local transactions as opposed to 30%+ charged by other platforms. I choked when I was told one of the local streaming & sales platforms takes as much as 70% of each stream/sale from the artist. 70%.
The icing on the cake is that there is still always the aggregator fee with these platforms, and who suffers from all of these cuts? The artist or label.
Ps: These are the same aggregators that send excel sheet as profit statement — whenever they feel like.
One thing to note now is, there’s a culture to support artists you love by buying their music. Fans know creating is hard and expensive, hence, most are willing to support with their money. We’ve seen this trend with most of the artists on our platform, and it’s quite refreshing.
Lastly, Selar brings a lot of simplicity in the music buying process for the customer so there’s little or no barrier to legally getting music; for any album sold on Selar, one can buy it with less than three clicks on visiting the single/album page of the artist, and we’ve made a lot of effort to support five currencies today(NGN, GHS, KES, USD & GBP), as well as multiple payment methods like card, bank account, USSD, QR, Mobile Money, Mpesa, and we’re working to add more too.
Summary
Every Artist in Nigeria, Ghana & Kenya should use Selar. Why? because it will profit them greatly.
Is music our only focus on Selar? Definitely not. Selar enables creators sell all kinds of things; physical and digital, but it really shines a light for indie & non-indie artists that need to earn as much as they can from their sales.
Would we focus on delivering the best experience for artists and music fans on Selar over the next couple of months? Of course, yes!
Saw the TEDx talk by MI on youtube recently, where he talked about the importance of working in synergy to move the Music industry forward because of how much potential we aren’t tapping into yet, and I couldn’t agree more. We’re excited to work with Record Labels, banks, and Telco networks(GLO, MTN, AIRTEL, 9Mobile e.t.c) to help make creators, artists & entrepreneurs get the most profit from their hard-work.
Finally, I love this tweet by Dolapo, he’s the founder of a creative community called WeTalkSound. He’s been so kind to introduce us to so many artists today, why? He really believes we’re the best thing to happen to the music industry since sliced bread :)
If you’d love to support amazing artists and businesses on Selar, here are five(5) of my favourite creators & products at this time:
- George Okoro Wedding Magazine(https://selar.co/gowm): This is his second edition, and I have to say, it’s amazing, and better than the first edition that launched last year! Like he really DID THAT! I can definitely vouch that this will be the best magazine you’ll read this year. The quality and content is A1.
- Kerygma Album(https://selar.co/kerygma): One of the best Gospel albums out there now. Lyrics ✅ Vocals ✅ It’s almost a year since this album was released, but it still slaps! It’s no surprise it’s one of the top selling albums on Selar today.
- Halfprice Album by Alpha(https://selar.co/halfprice): M.I has given him multiple shoutouts for this amazing body of work. My favorite track is probably Boli & Fish, and this may or may not have anything to do with the nostalgia of Port harcourt Boli & Fish I miss so dearly😭.
- StreemBooks(https://selar.co/StreemBooks): I’ve always been a hard copy kind of guy, hence, my love for Streem Books, they’re an amazing business that sells physical books and deliver to anywhere in Lagos, they update their catalogue very frequently, so you can check them out and order a book from them.
- Mount Zion Films(https://mountzion.selar.co/): This may just be a shameless plug with the sole idea of saying (for the 10000th time), that Mount Zion Films, the biggest Gospel movie production company in Africa uses Selar to power their digital movie downloads as well as streaming service.
