Adewale Akintade is the founder and CEO of NewBanger, a music promotion marketplace connecting independent African artists with verified playlist curators, music bloggers and social media creators.
Before NewBanger, Adewale was an independent artist in Lagos who ran into the same problem most artists face: paying for promotion with no way to know if it actually worked. Playlist placements that turned out to be dead playlists. Influencers paid upfront who never posted. Blog features promised and never published.
He built the first version of NewBanger to fix that for himself, and it ended up signing up over 1,000 artists and 500 curators. The platform was rebuilt from the ground up based on feedback from both sides, and relaunched in 2026 as a more transparent, accountable way to promote music across Africa.
Founder Story