From left to right, Orange Liberia Chief Marketing Strategy & Communication Officer, Julien Paquier, Award Winning Artiste, J. Slught, Liberian Music Executive, Christina Cooper, Ambassador of Liberia Copyright Society, DJ Asaboy, Rapper, Owezzy, and Representative from the Liberia Copyright Society, DJ Weezy.

On Friday, January 14, 2022, PlusLiberia, a Liberian musical website officially launched its online music store in partnership with Orange Liberia Telecommunications to create a form of revenue for Liberian musicians. The event was held at Orange Liberia Telecommunications head office on the Capitol Bypass.

Over the years, Liberian entertainers, mostly musicians, have complained about the lack of copyright law being infused into the Liberian entertainment industry. The absence of this law has caused many Liberian musicians to have many hit songs without anything to show financially.

Prior to the days of simply going online to download Liberian music, Liberian musicians sold their songs through CDs for which they constantly battled street music vendors who recopied their songs and sold them without their consent or approval.

Other artistes made and still make ends meet by hosting shows to perform their trending or popular songs, while a few of them have a couple of endorsement deals to keep them living a bit more luxuriously than others.

A couple of years back, Liberian artistes living in the diaspora started to use the Apple store, iTunes, Spotify, Tidal, and other top mainstream applications to sell their songs. A few locally based artistes followed the process shortly after, but that caused many Liberians without access to credit cards to become unable to purchase some of their favourite Liberian music.

Now, with the introduction of the PlusLiberia online music store in partnership with Orange Liberia Telecommunications, Liberian musicians can now benefit from their crafts. The partnership will provide Liberian musicians a direct opportunity to make revenues from their songs. Also, the creation of the PlusLiberia music store will allow Orange Subscribers to purchase Liberian music directly from their mobile phones.

Artistes along with their managers or public relations officers can register by signing a two-year deal with PlusLiberia and Orange Liberia that will generate them a minimum of ten cents United States dollars ($0.10 USD) per download, which will cost users one United States dollars ($1 USD) for 30 songs if they signed up for the one United States dollars ($1 USD) package for 30 days, or receive 500 songs for the five United States dollars package ($5 USD) package.

Like all business agreements, the two-year contract will split the revenue generated from the music store between the artistes, Plusliberia and Orange Liberia. Each artiste will receive 50% of the sales produced from the application on a monthly basis, while PlusLiberia and Orange Liberia will receive 30% and 20% respectively.  

After the registration process, artistes will have access to monitor the daily transactions being done on the application. TeddyRide, Nuchie Meek, J. Slught, Natif, Boifatty, Mr. Parbai, Triller, Dixon along with some other promising artistes are already a part of this revolution.

Orange Liberia will offer free marketing and publicity services for registered applicants, and it is of no cost for applicants to upload songs into the application. Interested applicants can contact PlusLiberia via email, plusliberia@gmail.com.

By: Robert Serge Saint-Pé

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