Tanzania: “I Was On the Verge of Bankruptcy” – Diamond

Diamond Platnumz, a Tanzanian musician, almost went broke seven years ago at a time when his musical career had just begun to expand. He was already popular in East and Central Africa and little money had begun to flow his way from his early music success. 

His Wasafi (WCB) record label was still in its infancy and nothing much revolved around it. This was when he launched his number one hit track in September 2013, which has managed to gain 7 million views on Youtube to date. Nigerian music dominated the charts at the time, and Davido was the young kid on the block, joining the music and taking it by storm. 

Diamond felt the need to introduce himself to West Africa, having already conquered East Africa at around the same time. He was hoping for a collabo from Davido, which he says almost dried up his coffers. 

“My video cost used to be about US$ 3,000 (Sh326, 000) per video before doing the first video version of Number One at Ogopa Djs in Nairobi. I went 10 times higher with Number One and spent US$30,000 (Sh3.3 million) or so on flying the Ogopa Djs video crew to Cape Town, South Africa and shooting my video. The result was fantastic, and that gave me the green light to approach Davido for a remix,” Diamond revealed in a Nairobi News interview.” 

But that was just the plea for big spending, since he was forced to take bank loans when he eventually secured a chance to collaborate with Davido on Number One remix. To fund my video and collaboration with Davido in Lagos, I took loans from Tanzanian banks because I had to fly there with my team,” he added.” 

Diamond, however, never regrets the risky move because it paid off almost immediately after the remix opened him to a new market and opportunities that allowed Wasafi to jump-start. The fact that the number one remix released in January 2014 accumulated over 43 million views on Youtube is evidence of this. 

With 4.83 million Youtube subscribers, Diamond is currently the top artist in Africa and leads in the amount of Youtube views on the continent. He is the only artist in Africa to have cumulatively passed the one billion viewpoints mark. Davido is second with more than 797 million cumulative views.

Data source: All Africa news