If you’re like me, discovering and downloading new Nigerian music can often feel like a chore. It usually involves rummaging through Nigerian music blogs, while making a deliberate effort to ignore all the distracting text, images, ads and ever engaging comment sections. Tunes.ng is looking to address that difficulty.
Tunes.ng is a free mobile-only music search engine that tries to provide an elegant and simple solution to discovering and downloading Nigerian music to your mobile devices. Tunes.ng founder, Donnie Ibiyemi, has made it clear that they’re not looking to compete with any of the existing music services (Spinlet, Iroking and co.). They are not a music streaming service, do not have a business model, and refuse outright to be tagged a “startup”.
Tunes.ng is basically a music download link aggregator. The music files aren’t stored on the tunes.ng database; there is in fact no database. According to the creators, there are 3 engines responsible for all the back end magic:
- a music engine that crawls and aggregates music download links from famous Nigerian music sites like Notjustok.com, Jaguda.com and filehosting sites like 4shared;
- a discovery engine which will handle subscriber notifications and;
- a video engine that crawls YouTube and aggregates Nigerian music videos that are related to the search query.
The landing page is definitely elegant and simple. For the primary purpose of discovering and downloading new music, the “Top Music” and “Top Videos” tabs would do. As for the search feature, it is nowhere near apt. I actually have a better chance finding “Ada Ada” using Google than I do using tunes.ng. It appears the search results are populated directly from mp3Skull, no filter. That would make Tunes.ng esentially an mp3skull clone that is mobile, under the pretext of local relevance. I mean, if the search funtionality actually understood that I was looking only for Nigerian music, and filtered my queries accordingly, maybe I would not have a reason to use mp3skull or notjustok.
I’m all for the idea of a common repository for downloading free Nigerian music. However, I don’t really dig Tunes.ng’s implementation. As a discovery tool, it’s passable; there’s plenty room for improvement. However, as a Nigerian music search engine, I’m just not feeling it. At least not yet. Maybe in future iterations I will. You can try out tunes.ng for yourself and see if you like it.
