Spinlet (2006 - 2020)

2006 - 2020

dead africa

spinlet began in tampere in 2006 as a finnish music player that went nowhere. nigerian investors bought it in 2011 and relaunched it out of lagos as the first streaming service in sub-saharan africa, carrying african catalog nobody else had bothered to license. it reached close to two million app downloads and then hit a wall that had nothing to do with music, because nigerian bank cards could not be charged automatically month after month and almost nobody re-pays on purpose. the site stopped answering in late 2020 and no one announced anything.

» see spinlet.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Spinlet sits in the part of internet history i can read about but cannot remember. Its market was Lagos and Nairobi, plus diaspora listeners in Britain and the United States. to be honest. none of it ever crossed my screen. What pulled me toward it was the cause of death, which is one of the stranger ones on this site.

It began in Tampere. to be honest. Two Finnish brothers built a mobile music player in 2006, it went nowhere in particular for five years. for whatever reason. in 2011 a group of Nigerian investors bought it through Verod Capital Management in Lagos. Eric Idiahi ran it first. The beta opened in May 2012 and the real launch came in 2013, at which point Spinlet could call itself the first music streaming service in sub-Saharan Africa and be telling the truth.

i was not paying attention by then, but anyway, the pitch was catalog. but yeah, spotify and Deezer held the world's recorded music and almost none of Nigeria's. spinlet licensed the African labels and distributors the big services had not bothered with. anyway. It made itself useful on the supply side too, becoming the IFPI's first ISRC manager in the country, which meant it handed out the identifiers that let a recording be tracked and paid for at all. By October 2015 it had close to two million app downloads and a relaunched web player carrying more than 1.5 million tracks.

this happened more in the english speaking internet than where i was. it died of banking. to be honest. Not of music, and not of Apple. Nigerian bank cards could not be charged automatically month after month. anyway. every subscriber had to go and physically pay again, deliberately, thirty days after the last time. Almost nobody does that (close enough). Spinlet's former head of legal put it plainly afterward: if people have to bring out their cards every month, they just will not.

That is the part i keep turning over. A subscription is a promise your card keeps on your behalf while you forget the service exists. by then. by the mid 2010s that machinery was so ordinary where i live that i never once thought about it. by then. more or less. Spinlet was selling the same product into a country where the rail underneath it had not been built yet. No amount of catalog fixes a card that cannot bill itself.

~ the record ~

Born	2006, in Tampere, Finland, as a mobile music player
Peak	close to two million app downloads by october 2015
Killed	september 2020
Lifespan	fourteen years, seven of them in Lagos
Made by	Verod Capital Management, after two Finnish brothers
Killed by	bank cards that could not bill themselves

~ the early days ~

this part you had to be in the US for, and i was not. For two or three years it worked well enough to look like the answer. Verod put money behind it (name escapes me). in '14 the Nigerian Communications Commission granted it a value-added services license so it could bill through the phone operators instead. There was a stretch where Spinlet was simply the name attached to legitimate digital music in West Africa. anyway. Ice Prince put Fire of Zamani up on it in October 2013 (cant remember the exact year).

this part i was not really around for. anyway, the revenue split sent sixty percent to the artist. In a market where recorded music paid almost nothing and the money came from shows, that number was the actual product. Spinlet was not selling listening to Nigerians. It was selling a working payout to Nigerian musicians. the listeners were how the payout got funded.

~ the fall ~

i wasnt close to this part of the story, still. The chief executive's seat turned over four times in five years, which is usually a symptom rather than a cause. Idiahi handed to Neil Schwartzman in January 2013, Schwartzman lasted until February 2014, Nkiru Balonwu resigned at the end of June 2016, John Ajah took the chair that October (dont quote me on that). Companies churn like that when the model underneath is not converting and everyone can see it in the numbers.

this is mostly told from the outside. Then Apple Music arrived in Nigeria and the one argument Spinlet had left stopped working. Being the service with the African focus mattered while the alternative was a catalog with no Nigerian music in it (close enough). anyway. look, once the global platforms licensed the same artists, a smaller player with a worse app and a payment system that shed subscribers every thirty days had nothing to say.

~ what got buried with it ~

i pretty much was not paying attention by then, but anyway. The last years went into selling streaming as a service to banks and phone operators, which is what a consumer product does after it has given up on consumers. Then it stopped, there was no announcement and no transfer of anybody's library anywhere else. The final working copy of spinlet.com in the Internet Archive is dated September 2020. the crawler finds nothing at all after that, because the domain stopped resolving rather than serving an error page.

this happened more in the english speaking internet than where i was, what went down with it was the unglamorous half. back then. Getting African independent catalog cleared and coded is slow administrative work that nobody writes about. for whatever reason. spinlet did a lotta it before it ran outta money. That kinda registry does not transfer to a new owner when a startup evaporates (if memory serves). It just gets done again, years later, by somebody else who has to start from the beginning.

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