Spotify has added Kenyan rapper, drummer and cultural entrepreneur Muthoni Drummer Queen to its EQUAL Music Program, as the Artist of the Month for December.
The Spotify EQUAL program aims to foster gender equality in music and provide a platform to highlight influential female creators in the region and across Africa.
Muthoni Drummer Queen has achieved acclaim for her own music and for her wider work in the Kenyan music industry. She is the brains behind the Blankets and Wine music festival, which has provided a platform for alternative musicians in the region since 2008. The festival has come to incorporate elements of fashion, art, and literature in addition to music. Having started out as a way to promote independent acts, the festival has also played host to a number of internationally-acclaimed acts from across Africa.
Muthoni also founded perFORM which is a music business and artistic development incubator. Since its inception in 2019, perFORM aims to enable practitioners in the music industry to filter, order, refine, and master the business and artistic skills required to build a sustainable music career.
In November this year, Muthoni released a new album titled River. African Fever, one of he tracks in the album, will be featured on the EQUAL Africa and EQUAL Global playlists.
River is Muthoni’s fourth studio album and the third made in collaboration with Swiss production duo GR and Hook. It features a number of global Afro-diasporic sounds, blended with hip-hop, reggae dancehall, R&B, and traditional drumbeats from various ethnic communities around Kenya. The album’s genesis came during a Nairobi creative residency in 2019 and was further developed during a 50-plus date touring season that same year.
Other African artists to have been featured on Spotify’s EQUAL program include Kenya’s SSARU, Nigeria’s Ayra Starr and South Africa’s DBN Gogo.