Banku music boss, Mr Eazi has officially launched his Empawa Africa project to empower and support emerging African artistes through sponsoring of their videos and music projects.
This launch took place on the 20th of November where Mr Eazi disclosed what the project is about, the inspiration behind it and how people can benefit from it.
According to this announcement, ten artistes out of the one hundred artistes that'll be supported will follow Mr Eazi to South Africa for an Incubator programme where they'll be properly mentored and given the opportunities to work with producers in the global music industry and hopefully get further investment.
On the inspiration behind this project, Mr Eazi revealed;
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Basically people have funded videos for me, like Skin tight for instance, I didnt pay the full cost bvecause my director funded it halfway and that has been happening since I came into the scene, I have been lowkey helping people just like people helped me and this time I just said, let's turn it into something.
Disclosing the criteria for selecting artistes, Mr Eazi said;
All emerging artistes need to do is put up great content on instagram with the hashtag Empawa 100. It can be a video of you rapping or a video of you singing. It has to be Instagram because it's easy for us, especially with how you can track all the posts directed to you with the hastag used. So if you're using hashtag Empawa 100, I can see it, view it and track the posts.
On how to continue this considering the finance that'll be involved in it, the singer said;
This is my initiative. some of my fundings specifically the first 300,000 dollars for content but now I'm a multinational ambassador for BETPower, a mobile betting company, so we've come together, we're supposed to be pushing the jackpot called BETPower Jackpot and for pushing the BETPower jackpot, I was supposed to be getting a percentage, but instead of taking a lump sum, I said I wasn't going to take that, instead I'm going to get a percentage from the jackpot and push it and now I've brought that percentage even down and it's going to be called Empawa so it's now going to be called Empawa Jacket and 10% of the entire revenue, not Mr Eazi revenue o, the entire revenue, goes to fund the Empawa foundation. The jackpot is running in seven countries, so we can rest assured that there's a lot of money to run the project. So hopefully next year should be bigger.
With this development in the artiste career, most people are wondering if he'll be stopping his music and facing the business part of it, but that is not how the Mr Eazi is planning his path. He revealed to Notjustok that;
I'm still both. I own my own record label and I invest in my music and I also have an artiste, GuiltyBeat and I invest in his music too. We also do distributions for some A-listers people don't know about. so this is part of what I've always done, we're just taking it a notch or rather notches higher.
On how he handles both effortlessly, Eazi said;
Being an investor and an artiste make me kind of see best of both worlds, and I'm still experimenting to find the best way to do things. Hopefully, I can learn with myself and then people after me can benefit because I've been on both sides. As people will see I've been steadily trying to figure out how to push globally with partnership and licensing deals here and there and once I find the right formula on the right working structure, we could do a lot more.
The project has already launched in other African countries such as Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Ghana, Nigeria and coming up next is Zimbabwe an Zambia.
