Nairobi, Kenya – Mahindra Comviva, a company providing mobility solutions, announced an exclusive partnership with TRACE TV, a music channel, to launch TRACE Music Stars across all Airtel operations in Africa. Contestants will have the chance to compete for a grand prize of 30,000 Euros and a recording deal with Universal Music. The winner will travel to New York to be personally mentored by American R&B and hip hop recording artist, songwriter, and record producer, AKON. The grand finale will be held on March 2015.
Mahindra Comviva is providing a complete ecosystem and end-to-end solution for the rapid deployment, provisioning, execution, management and billing of various value-added services to enable this initiative. Additionally, Mahindra Comviva’s mKaroke will provide the users with real-time singing analysis and voice supervision to deepen the user engagement.
TRACE Music Stars will be executed as a large-scale branding campaign and value added music service, available exclusively for Airtel subscribers. It is an IVR based music competition that gives subscribers the opportunity to become the next big music star in their country and possibly across Africa and the world without having to go through long and expensive traditional castings. The competition will offer participants an option to rehearse on a phone karaoke that scores their performance. On scoring low points the contestants can try again without having to stand in long queues.
Commenting on the initiative, Atul Madan, Head of Digital Services, Mahindra Comviva said, “Mahindra Comviva has been constantly working towards revolutionising the music market in Africa by providing localised content, identifying independent artists and labels, and disseminating music across the region. On an average, music services in Africa contribute 40% to operators’ downloadable content revenues. To cater to fast evolving trends and sustain consumer engagement, the company is constantly introducing innovative service features like mKaraoke, user generated music content and social RBT. The partnership with TRACE and Airtel is a testament of our efforts in emerging as the leader in the digital music space.”
Olivier Laouchez, TRACE’s CEO, said, “We are pleased to partner with Mahindra Comviva in bringing a platform to empower the youth. Mahindra Comviva’s unrivalled expertise in digital music, VAS Technologies and deep understanding of the African market helped us bring this initiative to life.”
Mahindra Comviva is betting big on its digital music portfolio across video, voice and text. The company has collaborated with over 110 local and international content providers, copyright bodies, local artists, premium music labels and production houses in the continent. The company owns rights to unique music tracks in African, Arabic and international categories, and offers multiple genres including Hip Hop, Pop, Inspirational, Rumba, Hip Life, Football Chants, Gospel, Jazz, Rock, Reggae and Retro in more than 35 local African languages.
