Africkiko – African Music Streaming Platform
Mobile Developer & Backend Engineer
Africkiko is a full-featured African music streaming platform enabling artists to distribute, monetize, and promote their music while giving listeners seamless access to curated content, charts, and offline playback.
"Designed and shipped a production-grade music platform handling audio processing, payments, and large-scale user engagement with a mobile-first architecture."
Problem
African artists lacked a dedicated, scalable platform that supports fair monetization, local payment methods, and reliable audio streaming optimized for regional connectivity challenges.
Solution
Built an end-to-end music streaming ecosystem with robust audio processing, artist monetization, background playback, and localized payment systems optimized for African markets.
Architecture
Mobile-first architecture using Flutter for the client, Node.js + Express for APIs, MongoDB for data persistence, Redis & BullMQ for background processing, and FFmpeg for audio processing. Media is stored on object storage (S3-compatible), with background workers handling encoding, analytics, and notifications.
Key Features
- ✓Music streaming with background playback
- ✓Offline downloads and smart caching
- ✓Audio re-encoding and metadata repair using FFmpeg
- ✓Artist verification and profile management
- ✓Charts for trending, most streamed, and most downloaded tracks
- ✓Subscription and pay-per-track monetization
- ✓Mobile money and card payment integration
- ✓Promotional banners and featured content
- ✓Admin dashboard for content moderation
- ✓Multilingual support (English & French)
Deep Dive
Africkiko is a full-stack music streaming platform built to empower African artists and listeners. The system supports audio uploads, automatic re-encoding and metadata repair using FFmpeg, background playback, offline downloads, curated charts, and artist monetization. The platform integrates mobile money and card payments, supports multilingual content, and provides analytics for artists and administrators. Built with scalability, performance, and low-bandwidth environments in mind.
Tech Stack
Tags
Project Metrics
Duration
2023 – Present
Team Size
4 people
Impact
Enabled hundreds of artists to distribute music, stream content reliably, and monetize through subscriptions and downloads.