Africa-Press – Lesotho. As a response to the challenge of lack of music websites for Lesotho music industry, Tokelo Foso (18) has created a music website dubbed: ‘Slick23 Music’ for local musicians to upload their singles, albums and other audio projects and make them accessible to the followers.
Born and bred at Ha Matala, Foso is currently studying Bachelor of Computer and Information Sciences at Monash South Africa in his first year. He is also the best producer award winner of Ultimate Music Awards (UMAs) 2015. He says the name ‘Slick’ for his website is actually an extraction from his alias’ name in the entertainment industry, ‘Just Slick. ’
Speaking to the Informative Arts & Lifestyle, Foso says even though the site was initially for his own businesses, he identified a gap locally, of lack of music sharing platforms on the internet and therefore felt a need to meet the musicians halfway and make things a bit easier for them.
“Slick23 Music is a music sharing platform I commenced around December 2017. The URL however may not be new to some as it was originally meant to be my personal website as a producer (Just Slick).
“I then changed it to Slick23 Music due to the fact that I noticed here at home we lack music sharing websites of our own. It caters for singles, mixtapes/albums, videos and even lyrics too, artists are able to upload these materials on their own,” he says.
Since the innovation, he says the response has been great thus as a few well known acts have been supporting the initiative as well. He says over 150 singles and 20+ projects (albums, EPs) have been published on the site to date.
“From the stats on my side including views and song downloads, I am overwhelmed,” says Foso going on to cite that the highest performing song is the recent ‘Sebentin LSO’ remix song, which he believes is on over 5k downloads.
The song was released only a week ago (Sebentin LSO remix) and it features a handful of local’s household names, the likes of T-Mech, Mega Hertz and Blaze Shatta Queen to name but a few.
He says the platform is well used such that that “on average, say every two days a single comes out, of which when released will drive more traffic towards the website”.
He however therefore admitted that there’s still a room for improvement on his initiative. “One technical issue I’m working on is improving the speed and reliability of the website, e.
g when Sebentin LSO remix was released, the song was in such high demand, that website itself crashed quite a number of times during that weekend it was released,” he says
To make money out of the site, Foso says he’s planning to offer content (the songs, and all) advertising on social media platforms to get more views and clicks and there will be a small fee for that while items will also be sold on the website.
