Nigeria’s Simi breaks streaming record

The artist’s 2017 album Simisola edged past previous record holder Ijele – the Traveler, an album by Igbo highlife act Flavour. Whereas Ijele had clocked 910 000 streams, Simi’s Simisola has been streamed more than 1 million times.

Simisola became available on Boomplay on 8 September 2017. Since then the artist has released several of the songs as singles, each accompanied by a video. It is the first album on the platform to reach 1 million streams.

“The streaming statistics for the two projects [Flavour’s Ijele and Simi’s Simisola], presently stands at 926k for Ijele, while Simisola has over 1 million streams,” reads a statement from Boomplay. “Both Simisola and Ijele were first available on our platform less than 15 months ago.”

Simisola’s success has also come with a significant dose of critical acclaim. “[If] quality of work were the only requirement to win…Simi’s success is a foregone conclusion,” IfeOluwa Nihinlola wrote in a positive review published by Music In Africa.

Her recording colleagues agree. Recently, Brymo told Music In Africa that he considered her as one of his “top three artists” currently recording and releasing music in Nigeria. Her frequent collaborators, producers Sess and Oscar Herman Ackah, have also praised her songwriting ability.

At last year’s edition of the All Africa Music Awards, she was named the winner of the Songwriter of the Year category.

Both Simisola and Ijele are quite some distance from the other albums on Boomplay. The third and fourth place in terms of streaming numbers are occupied by Tope Alabi’s Yes and Amen and Nathaniel Bassey’s This God Is Too Good. Both are gospel albums and have clocked 736 000 and 438 000 streams respectively.

Reacting to the news on Instagram, Simi thanked her fans. "Thank you so much #SimiArmy for streaming this album," she wrote. "Thank you for the love. Being that this is a Nigerian platform and we've never really had a culture of streaming, this means a lot to me. Thank you. Thank you @boomplaymusic."

So far, Simisola has yielded a half-dozen singles. The latest is a remake of the juju music maestro Ebenezer Obey classic ‘Aimasiko’.

Watch the video for the song below: