Virgin Music Label & Artist Services is launching in Africa, where it will be based in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, Universal Music Group announced Tuesday (June 7).
In February 2021, UMG relaunched the Virgin Records brand as the new-look Virgin Music Label & Artist Services, a global distribution division that, in the U.S., operates within Capitol Music Group on the same structure as the former Caroline, with wings in the U.K., Japan, Germany, France and across Latin America. In the 16 months since, the company has added an outpost in Australia and one in Brazil, in addition to several areas of continental Europe and adding on partners and labels like WorkShow, Range Media, God Willing and the Mushroom Group, among many others.
The new Africa wing of the indie-focused division will be led by Universal Africa’s director of international development Guylaine Clery and UMG Africa’s head of A&R Félix Pea, who both will report to UMG Africa managing director Franck Kacou.
“Our vision for Virgin Music in Africa is based on an observation that African cultural heritage has not yet fully found its place in the digital world and on DSPs globally,” Kacou said in a statement announcing the move. “Indeed, with some of these services rarely existing in certain territories, this heritage is unequally represented. Our ambition is to make African music a showcase of all that Africa and its diaspora can offer the world.”
Virgin Music Africa is getting off the ground with a formidable catalog of more than 15,000 works, over 100 artists and 50 label partners across 25 countries, with a mandate to support both current African artists and labels and to bring historical and out-of-print titles into the digital realm for the first time. And it comes at a time when African music is making more waves globally, and particularly in the U.S., than it ever has, with the explosion of afrobeats in particular impacting the Billboard charts to the point that Billboard launched a chart specifically for the genre in partnership with Afro Nation earlier this year.
“We intend to give new life to forgotten songs, our investigation will go as far as digitizing them to make them accessible to as many people as possible, everywhere in the world,” Kacou continued. “The creation of this label services will make it possible to preserve, distribute, structure and promote the African musical heritage of yesterday, today and tomorrow, while also providing global distribution services to Africa’s most exciting artists, labels and entrepreneurs.”
