South Africa's largest record company Gallo has bought a stake in Africa's biggest content aggregator, Content Connect Africa, which, the two companies say, will "provide a platform for innovation for African music".
The Gallo Record Company itself was bought last year by the Lebashe Investment Group, which made it a division of its media business Arena Holdings. Shortly after that, South African DJ and producer Black Coffee also bought into the music company.
Announcing the new partnership, Gallo and Black Coffee say that this is all part of a plan to provide African artists with more options when it comes to monetising and distributing their music.
Gallo's Simukayi Mukuna says: "We would like to see artists far more involved in the process and not be tied to the one size fits all deal structures. We want to develop solutions that are born from Africa, for Africa, to export to the world. Our approach is underpinned by an emphasis on the use of scalable digital tools that support the creative process".
Meanwhile CCA's Antos Stella adds: "We're at the beginning of an industry revolution where African artists participate in structures to encourage new ways to monetise content. CA has a footprint across the continent as an aggregator to the continent's major telcos, as well as a pipeline of established and emerging artists that will benefit from Gallo and its shareholder Black Coffee’s experience and guidance towards an equitable transformation".
And finally, Black Coffee says of the grand plan that motivated this deal: "We've had the same ten or fifteen artists dominate the last decade - this partnership provides us the capacity to develop faster by leveraging technology and the CCA relationships".