Strauss Lunyangwe

Donlu has taken a step further to spearhead the fight against correctly recording music getting played on all radio stations across the country.
In a recent survey that surfaced Radiomonitor, a UK based agency published that a large amount of music getting played is of international artists.
This prompted the founder of Donlu, Lewelyn Adams to sign an agreement with Radiomonitor to register with their portal. Radiomonitor monitors the music played on radio and TV in 97 countries. This airplay data is used by all major record labels, music broadcasters, media, PR and royalty management.
Adams told Entertainment 
Now! that they have been monitoring the charts for a few weeks to assess whether or not our local music appears on the list but to no avail. “We took it upon ourselves to reach out to Radiomonitor and engage with them on this basis. They have explained that they do not have Namibian songs/data on their portal and as such, the charts only show international songs. We came to an agreement and Donlu is now registered on the Radiomonitor portal. With this, it means that all songs on Donlu both old and new have been/will be loaded on their portal for monitoring,’’ he explained.
Radiomonitor in the past have only been monitoring 12 of the radio stations in Namibia, Donlu has now given them links to all the stations that have online streaming available. ‘’So from Monday onwards, all radio stations will be monitored and now we’ll be able to see exactly how many times a song has been played and on how many stations it has played. 
If songs are available or played on international radio stations, this data too will be collected,’’ he confirmed. With this data, artists can verify against their payments whether or not the correct amounts have been paid by music managing bodies such as Nascam.
 John Max, the CEO of Nascam said the Radiomonitor system for music use on-air is a great move to capture accurate data.
‘’We also had a meeting with Afstereo last week, they would like to set up monitor systems for music and adverts on radio stations and TV stations. We have tested their system and it gave us full data, including the oldest ones of 10 years ago. We are looking forward to engaging with them and testing the results for the full reporting on the music files use.’’
He further suggested that Donlu engage them as songwriters and composers have signed off their copyright works to Nascam.
“This means the musical works performed or made available in public are administered by Nascam, and an entity that reproduces the copyright works without the right procedures or authorisation from us is in violation of the copyright and neighbouring Rights Protection Act. We are in support of monitoring systems for copyright contents for accurate reporting on how many times the contents have been used, which at the end will be translate into good royalty income for the artists.’’   Being an avid supporter of local music, Adams feels that artists can now have proper records of how much they are owed once royalty payments are made to them. ‘’I’m all for the empowerment of our artists, making sure they get what they deserve. They put so much into making an album or a song and get so little in return. I’ve done what I could with our platform Donlu, but there’s still so much that can be done,’’ he 
concluded.