Kenyan music and the question of airplay allocation

Are Kenyan radio stations deliberately ignoring home-grown music in favour of Nigerian, Tanzanian and American artistes? This is a question that has evoked heated debate on social media via the hash tag #playKeMusic.

On the one hand, Kenyan artistes say local radio stations are deliberately refusing to play them. In their defence, radio presenters claim they do not dictate airplay — that music is selected and cued by a radio station’s music department and is based on market research. Audiences are split between the two camps; some support the artistes, while other observers point a finger at the artistes themselves, saying that they do not produce good content and neither do they market it properly.

Though no long-term solutions have been reached, the debate has borne some fruit, with various stations committing to play more Kenyan content.

It is said that in a war, the first casualty is always the truth. The facts have been drowned out by the shouting matches. Many voices of reason have remained mum for fear of generating bad blood with industry players. Though we reached out to several well placed radio executives, many chose to stay out of the discussion. It is also emerging that accurate data on air play and consumer preferences is hard to come by.

“Data is a big issue in the music industry,” musician Dan Chizi Aceda admits, adding, "A few years ago, I embarked on intense research. Unfortunately, when analysing airplay, we base it on our impressions not on real data.

People who listen to urban radio will have a different opinion from people who listen to vernacular stations. Nobody in the country is keeping verifiable numbers. The Communication Authority of Kenya (CAK) should be collecting this data, but they are not.”

His research is based on data collected in early 2015 from 50 TV and radio stations. He stated that out of 100 top-rotation songs at the time, 32 were Kenyan, 12 Nigerian, 15 Tanzanian, 14 American, seven were Ugandan, four Latin America, four Jamaican, one Zambian and one Zimbabwean.

In Mr Aceda’s estimation, vernacular stations have the highest rotation of local content, followed by Kiswahili stations, with those based in Nairobi playing Tanzanian, Ugandan, DRC and Jamaican music. Urban stations play the least amount of local content.

AIRPLAY

According to his research, the biggest hindrance to local music getting more airplay is poor distribution. “A deejay or radio station receives hundreds of emails from different artistes, and chances are they won’t open every single one of them,” Mr Aceda says.

According to a survey conducted by Viffa Consult over the period of January 2019, most Kenyans spend between one and five hours listening to music, and 90 per cent of it is foreign. When asked what percentage of their playlist constitutes Kenyan music, 21 per cent said 1-10 per cent; 11 per cent said 51-60 per cent, while only 2 per cent said 71-80 per cent.

Top on the genre list was gospel, followed by hip hop, Bongo reggae, rhumba and, finally, kwaito.

No objective argument can be sustained in the absence of data — and one aspect that urban music listeners have failed to take into account is the popularity of grassroots artistes, whose music is just as Kenyan as Khaligraph and Octopizzo’s.

Artistes such as Alphonce Kioko Maima, Mike Sweetstar Rotich, Sammy Irungu and Musa Jakadala appeal to the man on the ground and are commercially successful, although they are often unknown to the national audience.

Though it is an art, music is a business like any other, and needs commercial (and not just creative) input to succeed. Ohangla musician Musa Jakadala says that this is how he has grown his fortunes. “Proper marketing and networking with people in the media is what has really helped me,” he says.

“When Gidi Gidi Maji Maji came to perform in Kisumu last year, I made an effort to connect with them and those networks have really come through for me.”

According to experts in the industry, many grassroots artistes make a good living without ever receiving airplay. Emmy Simotwo is a publicist who represents various artistes, helping them commercialise their music, and handles their publishing.

“I represent a wide range of artistes and I must admit that my grassroots artistes make more money than urban acts,” she says. “There are artistes who don’t receive any air play, but continue to successfully tour around the country and abroad.”

It is a topic that is likely to continue eliciting sharp reactions and emotive hard-line stands. However, for the sake of all the hardworking Kenyans who depend on the music industry for sustenance, one can only hope that a structured conversation will yield long-term solutions.