YOLO & Waabeh Hook Up to Bring You Great African Music

Waabeh is an audio marketplace, powered by the Internet, mobile money and good vibes. Waabeh allows users to stream, download, and buy audio content. Waabeh [Waa-Bay] means awesome in sheng.

Waabeh is fully stocked with the freshest sounds coming out of Africa, from music, podcasts, audio books, radio documentaries and educational material. Essentially, anything that you would love to hear. Waabeh is solving the problem of discovery and distribution of audio continent from Africa.

The Waabeh Android Application was launched on Thursday, 27th January to coincide with Intel’s entry into the African Smartphone market, with the YOLO handset.

Invisibility is worse than piracy, and this is arguably the single most compelling challenge facing producers of audio content from Africa: how to get product to people quickly and painlessly. Discovery and distribution forms the backbone our vision for a solution focused on a) ease of use b) mobile.

Access to the content is through downloads, streaming and payments are via mobile money as well as major credit cards. Waabeh has over 1,000 tracks of music, podcasts and audio books from our partnerships with artists, publishers and local record companies. It is spreading beyond our borders to East and Central Africa by mid this year.

Waabeh’s unique partnership with Intel allowed an accelerated development of a cool Android app which is only available for the Yolo Smartphone over the next three months on the Android play store. Additionally, it comes with almost 100 tracks of local music, audio books and podcasts available for download. The app will then be available and open to all other Android devices.

The four-person Waabeh team (Tim, King, Jeff and Ciku) bring a combined 25 years in development, system design, music business and most importantly, a love for solving Africa’s problems using technology.