Akinyele Olubodun‘s Hip Hop and R’n’B Music platform “Playmyjamz” wins International UN Youth Award

Akinyele Olubodun and his team at the weekend received the international multimedia award „World Summit Youth Award“ in Graz, Austria. The Nigerian website “Playmyjamz” which offers underprivileged musicians a unique gateway to fans and fame:release their songs for free and have them rated by the online community. The most popular artists win air time on the radio and an international fan base. For young Nigerians the chance to promote their music online is an alternative to violence and poverty.

From the awards team press release,it explains that at Playmyjamz artists can create a profile and release their songs for download. So far more than 200 musicians have registered. In contrast to the music online platform “MySpace” at Playmyjamz users can rate the tracks and nominate their favourites. The most popular artists gain an international fan base and give interviews in a monthly magazine and on radio.

The platform offers young talents in Nigeria a chance: In spite of the country’s oil affluence more than half of Nigerians live in poverty. The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) estimates that Nigeria will fail in reaching the Millennium Development Goals in almost all cases. “Every day I meet talented young people with potentials for greatness”, says founder Akinyele Olubodun. “But most of them don’t know how to put their skills to good use. Playmyjamz gives a voice to all the unheard talents and offers them the chance to step into the spotlight.”

The Award honours young people who take action on the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) using Internet and Mobile. Among the 18 Winners are the global network “The Global Experience” from Germany, a forum for intercultural action and understanding, and “Mashallah News”, a Lebanese news platform on the Middle East. While news on the region in traditional media are often focused on geopolitics, conflicts and war, Mashallah News seeks to offer a different picture, enriching prevailing images about urban life in fourteen major cities such as Istanbul, Jeddah, Cairo, Tehran, Ramallah or Beirut.

With websites and mobile-apps over 700 young producers, designers and developers from all over the world applied for the WSYA 2011. With four winning projects Egypt is frontrunner, followed by India (3) and Mexico (2). Projects from Portugal, France, Germany, Ghana, Nigeria, Lebanon, Bangladesh, Canada and Indonesia could each collect one award. The World Summit Youth Award has emanated from the UN World Summit on the Information Society. It seeks to motivate young people under the age of thirty to actively implement the Millennium Development Goals.

Congrats to Akinyele Olubodun and  Akinbiyi Adetunji for making Nigeria proud with this award!