Spotify today announced, in the spirit of giving back espoused by the Global Citizen movement, a donation to Surf Ghana in support of the nation’s budding community of creators.
Based in Accra, Surf Ghana is a collective that uses the practice of extreme sports like skateboarding and surfing as a driver for youth development. The organisation also creates a platform for local artists to promote positive values like tolerance, respect, peace, and the celebration of African creativity.
The donation, a 2-year-long partnership, will support Surf Ghana in building a community recording studio and providing value-added services, including mentorship, music production, development, and business education programmes geared toward creators.
In tandem with the organisation’s surfer and skater communities, the partnership also supports a broader set of creative sectors, including musical artists and producers, who organically collaborate.
The project born from this collaboration, “Vibrate Studio” hopes to empower the next generation of creatives.
“Rather than traditional learning, Vibrate Studio seeks to empower creatives through community building and mentorship. With the facility located at the Freedom Skatepark, the Surf Ghana collective seeks to launch a workstation for young creatives in the heart of the city of Accra. What Spotify is doing in partnering with us will go a long way towards helping us fulfil our vision of being an exponentially impactful centre for upskilling and mentoring Ghanaian youth while driving their social inclusion, education and empowerment,” says Sandy Alibo, founder of Surf Ghana.
Since Spotify officially arrived in Ghana, a string of emerging artists (including Moliy, Kofee Bean, Amaarae, Gyakie and Black Sherif) have been featured on-platform through playlisting and exposure to markets outside the country. With an estimated more than 7 million combined monthly Spotify listeners among them, these are just a few Ghanaian artists who’ve successfully used Spotify to build fanbases in cities as wide-ranging and far-flung as Mexico City, Delhi, Istanbul, Rotterdam and Johannesburg – to name a few.
“Spotify is committed to developing Ghana’s creator economy and this move presents a wonderful off-platform opportunity for us to be innovative in the way we show up for creators and their fans. For Spotify, Ghana is a cultural landmark that remains crucial to the story of modern-day African music and creativity,” says Spotify’s head of music for sub-Saharan Africa, Phiona Okumu.
Vibrate studio will be officially opened on Friday, October 14, 2022.
