South African artists have been encouraged to continue to use their different native and native languages to show their art, and to highlight themselves in a different way than what artists from other countries usually use.
That is due to the prominence of folk music, which is one of the most listened to music genres on Spotify. The statistics released by this company indicated that the number of people listening to music sung in the Zulu language has increased by 37%, which means an increase of 120% in the last two years.
The Head of the Music Department in South Africa at Spotify, Phiona Okumu, revealed that this shows that people are interested in music played using native languages, which is a sign that its market is big in the world.
Okumu said this while speaking at one of the annual art workshops held by Spotify at its new offices in Rosebank, Johannesburg, on Wednesday.
“This shows that you don’t have to use foreign languages to highlight your art, so we encourage other artists who are still coming to the role not to hesitate to use their different mother tongues,” he said.
These figures are proven by the fact that the singer Umafikizolo made a splash on Spotify last year with his hit song You are begging your motherwhich appears to have attracted more than 15 million listeners.
Okomu said that one of the things that made them happy was that there was more than R504 million in income from listening to the music of artists in this country last year, and that 67% of the artists in this country had their songs alternately in the top 50 list during the last year.
“Furthermore, we also found that more than 74% of the music played in South Africa reached different countries last year, which was a very large number that we had never reached before,” he said.