Muzikol Music Awards (MUMA) is an awards program designed by Muzikol for African musicians and music professionals driven by engineering.
Created to be 100% controlled by musical professionals such as musicians, promoters, managers and fans, MUMA recognizes and rewards those driving the thriving African music sector, starting with Cameroon and Africa.
“We believe that for the African music industry to truly thrive, Africans need to tell our own stories and control the narratives about our own art.” said founder and software engineer, Nges Brian.
“As African musicians, producers, promoters, record labels and managers, we must define our own success and reward those who truly deserves.”
The MUMA application uses artificial intelligence to manage nominations,votes and awards, securely analysing public entries and votes so as to exclude bias or favour of any kind.
“We invite fans to support their favourite artists by voting for them for any of the 3 Pan- African and 29 Cameroonian awards categories” said Nges Brian .
The inaugural MUMA 2020 will take place over two days in Douala, Cameroon on the 13 and 14 of November 2020. The first day will convene more than 250 industry stakeholders to share information, discuss the challenges facing Cameroonian and African music and make valuable connections. The second day will be a celebration of musicians and music professionals, with the main awards event expected to attract more than 1,500 attendees from all over Africa.
Each MUMA nominee is linked to a Muzikol profile with a history of their achievements and contributions to the industry. The online platform, driven by custom engineering and artificial intelligence, documents all the 174 nominees in the 32 awards categories.
Judging panels will evaluate the nominees and winners of the statistics categories, considering a diverse group of music industry stakeholders’ input. “Our committees are made up of independent industry experts – people with valuable, local experience, and no affiliations to MUMA, or indeed Muzikol itself,” added Nges Brian.
How it works
“It was important to us to build a secure platform that could each year select winners based on truly secure popular vote and above all value. ” said Nges Brian. “MUMA truly helps us reward the musicians and music professionals who have been exceptional throughout the music year and above all, truly rewards the music industry for what it is and how it operates.”
The MUMA’s innovative voting platform records two types of nominations – voter nominations, and statistical nominations.
MUMA received 14,000 voter nominations across 16 categories, with each voter allowed six category nominations. The MUMA platform automatically uses the detailed and secure information provided by the public to sort artists, tally the entries and create shortlists of the top 10 nominations per category.
“After final grading, the top 7 artists per category automatically become the final nominees, leaving no room for human error, bias, or favor,” said Nges Brian.
Simultaneously, statistical nominations shortlists are submitted by the nominations committee .Final nominee announcements will include motivations from the independent committee.
MUMA winners will be selected from the finalists of these two nomination processes.
For the Voters categories, the nominee with the highest score from public opinion will be selected by the platform itself, which securely analyses the number of votes without external interference. For Statistics Categories, A Judging Committee shall review the input from them and the nominee with the highest grade will be the winner.
The story so far
In 2017, Nges Brian launched the now popular community platform Muzikol, a multi-award-winning application for African artists to socialize with fans, producers, and other professionals, sell their music and merchandise, book artists, and set up events.
The entrepreneur began his journey in the music industry as a stage performer, releasing his first album in high school and quickly rising to fame in his local community. He’s since worked in production, promotion, and management, and uses technology to drive innovation in the industry he’s passionate about.
Muzikol is the first Cameroonian platform to sell music online through local payment methods like Mobile Money and Orange Money, and its success has led to the launch of the inaugural MUMA event in 2020.
