A friend of mine was telling me how he is still mourning the death of museke.com, the website that focused exclusively on African music at a time when there was none uniting the continent in the same way. They even had an awards show that awarded the boy band Sautisol some years ago. There is hope of this mourning ending soon though.
Eddingtone Hatitye, one of the founders of musicinafrica.net was in the country this week to discuss with content providers on their upcoming portal. This is a website that will focus on providing credible information on African music cutting across different spheres of the music industry in different countries. It will be sponsored by Siemens Stiftung and the Goethe Institut.
Among those present at the forum were Stanley Gazemba, an author and renowned cultural journalist, Paul Munene, photographer currently documenting live band music in Kenya and Tabu Osusa, owner of Ketebul records. Discussions revolved around music in Kenya, its history and how to go about collecting and filtering this content for the upcoming website.
Musicinafrica.net is set to launch in September this year and will feature four countries first, Nigeria, South Africa, Senegal, Kenya and DR Congo. These are the regional hubs of music in the continent.
Finally there is more than just an archive, but a place where a musician from Botswana can hook up with an orutu player in northern Uganda and create world-class music.