I imagined Y’ello Tracks as a stadium without walls: more than 300 million connected people across the MTN universe, every phone a stage, every screen a front-row seat, and African artists performing into an audience potentially larger than any physical venue on earth.
Y’ello Tracks began with a question that was both creative and technological: what would a live African music experience look like if the size of the audience was no longer determined by the number of people who could physically fit inside a venue?
By then, the mobile phone had become much more than a communications device. It was a screen, a music player, a camera, a social network, a ticket, a payment mechanism and increasingly the place where people discovered artists for the first time. For me, that fundamentally changed the meaning of a stage. If millions of people could simultaneously carry that stage in their pockets, then the traditional boundaries between concert, television show, recording studio, streaming experience and digital campaign could begin to disappear.
That thinking became central to the world I created with Y’ello Tracks. I developed and own the Y’ello Tracks intellectual property, including its editorial proposition, creative concept and underlying content architecture. From its inception, I conceived it as an artist-first African music platform built around premium live and on-demand content experiences, where the intimacy and immediacy of live performance could be captured with the production sophistication of a high-end music film and then continue living digitally long after the original performance had ended.
The idea of the audience was equally important. MTN already connected more than 300 million people across its wider universe, and creatively I began to imagine those subscribers as an enormous virtual stadium.
Instead of attempting to bring 300 million people to one venue, Y’ello Tracks could bring the stage to them. The mobile phone became the stage in their hands; the screen became the window into the performance; and the network became the infrastructure carrying African music from the artist into that vast connected audience.
The partnership with MTN therefore made sense at a level deeper than sponsorship. MTN provided the connective scale, while Y’ello Tracks created the editorial and experiential world around the music.
The ambition was to make the audience feel that they were not simply watching a piece of branded content on a device, but entering a premium live music environment through it.
As Executive Producer, Creative Director and Director of the Content Ecosystem and Digital Media, I worked across the complete architecture of that experience. I created and designed the Y’ello Tracks logo and brand identity, developed the visual language across the campaign, designed the stages and sets, headed production and staging, directed the filmed performances and events and served as showcaller throughout the productions. I treated the cameras, sound recording, stage architecture, lighting, digital environment, artist experience and eventual on-demand life of each show as parts of one creative system.
The stage was being designed for the people inside the room, but equally for somebody holding a phone thousands of kilometres away.
When an artist stepped into Y’ello Tracks, I wanted the audience to feel that they had entered that artist’s world. For those thirty minutes, everything — the cameras, the sound, the lights and the stage — existed to make the music feel bigger, closer, immersive and more alive.
One of the most important editorial decisions I made was to give artists time. I did not want Y’ello Tracks to become another format in which a musician arrived, performed one promotional single and disappeared between presenters and unrelated content. Each artist needed enough room to build a real musical experience, which meant allowing the show to develop at the pace of the performance rather than the pace of conventional television.
The format therefore evolved around dedicated artist-led live sets of approximately thirty minutes, giving each performer space to create a proper musical arc. They could open quietly, build gradually, shift mood, interact with musicians, change arrangements and reach a natural conclusion. What we were capturing was not simply the current hit; it was a portrait of an artist at a particular creative moment.
Visually, those performances were approached as premium multi-camera productions. High-end cameras surrounded the performance environment, creating multiple simultaneous perspectives from which the artist could be experienced.
Wide frames established the scale and architecture of the stage, moving and medium shots brought the viewer closer to the performance, while intimate close-ups captured expressions and details that even somebody standing in the physical audience might miss.
The sound demanded the same level of attention. Every performance was conceived around professional multi-track high-definition audio recording, separating instruments, vocals and performance elements so that the music could be properly mixed and preserved independently from the pictures.
The audience watching live or later on demand therefore did not simply receive a camera pointed at a stage. They entered an audiovisual experience built deliberately for the screen, where cinematic pictures and premium sound worked together to recreate the energy of being inside the performance.
That became the core experiential promise of Y’ello Tracks: live enough to feel immediate, cinematic enough to feel premium, and recorded well enough to endure.
The word live was fundamental to Y’ello Tracks, but I did not want it to mean temporary.
There is something irreplaceable about watching music as it happens. Live performance carries risk, spontaneity and human energy that cannot be manufactured afterwards. An artist may sing something slightly differently, a musician may extend a moment, an audience reaction may change the temperature of the room, and a camera can suddenly capture something nobody planned.
Y’ello Tracks was designed to preserve that immediacy while giving it a second life through premium on-demand viewing.
The live experience created urgency: the feeling that the audience was entering a specific moment alongside the artist. The on-demand experience created longevity. Someone discovering the musician later could enter the same show hours, days, weeks or months afterwards and still experience the performance as a complete piece of premium content.
For me, live and on demand were not competing forms. They were two halves of the same editorial idea.
The live moment created cultural energy. The on-demand catalogue created lasting value.Together they allowed Y’ello Tracks to behave more like a living music archive than a traditional event series.
Artist by artist, show by show, the platform began to turn into something I could never see in a single production day, a living library of African music, captured with the same premium care whether the person walking onto the stage was already famous or still becoming.
Across 97 recorded show entries, the Y’ello Tracks catalogue grew into an extraordinary cross-section of contemporary African music. Established stars sat alongside independent artists and emerging performers, while singers, bands, instrumentalists, electronic producers and DJs could all enter the same creative ecosystem without being forced into a common musical formula.
The early shows already demonstrated that breadth through Mimie, Anita Jaxson, Azawi, Sjava, Winnie Nwagi, Zikhona, Phila Dlozi, Vinka, Linda Sikhakhane, Nomculo, Shekhinah, Black Motion, Focalistic, Manu WorldStar, Buhle Womculo, Bomb$hell Grenade and Citizen Deep.
Those artists could not simply be photographed in the same way. Linda Sikhakhane’s contemporary jazz required patience and intimacy from the cameras. Black Motion brought another kind of physical and rhythmic energy into the room. Sjava carried his own emotional language, while Citizen Deep entered through the world of electronic music. The production system remained recognisably Y’ello Tracks, but the show had to reshape itself around whoever was performing.
The catalogue expanded through another Focalistic edition and shows starring Zuchu, The Rabbi Himself, Yasirah, Lungelo Moyo, Bobbi Fallon, Joyous Celebration, Nanette, Aslay, Morgan Heritage, Lebza the Villian, Musa Keys and Nandy, followed by another Focalistic-led edition alongside The Assembly ZA, Zipheko, Kamo Mphela, DJ Lash T, Thoko, Thando, Kidd969, Yanga Yaya, Ben Pol and Monica Magwana.
Then came Cleo Ice Queen, Joyous Celebration, Smanga, Bylwansta, Marioo, FKA Mash, Kea Zawadi, Ammo Moses, Dotcom, Pascal & Pearce, Dynamic Soul and DJ Slu, followed by Sally Boss Madam, Chikune, John Tsenoli, Money Ostrich, Zameka, Lioness, Bokkie Ult, Waters, JRTheeKing, Ammara, Sino Msolo and Aymos.
The catalogue continued through Neekstro, Chymamusique, Harmonize, Czar Odriego, Teekay Mxoexic, Feli Nandi, Abigail Chamz, Erica Da Silva, DJ Alba, Punk Mbedzi, Anzo and Siyanqoba Mthethwa, before expanding again with Zaricia Zacheus, Tate Buti, Yeezir, Ms Gideon, Young Lunya, DJ Kboz and CKay.
Later editions brought Locko, Krys M and Stanley Enow into the Y’ello Tracks world, followed by Nviiri The Storyteller, another Monica Magwana show and performances starring Jay Em, Jericho, Mzwake Ngubeni, DJ Castro and DJ Vuyo, while Morgan Heritage returned for another edition.
Return performances by artists including Focalistic, Joyous Celebration, Monica Magwana and Morgan Heritage gave the catalogue another dimension. An artist did not necessarily have to disappear from Y’ello Tracks after one appearance.
They could return at another moment in their career with different material, a different energy and a different relationship with the audience, allowing the archive to grow with them.
Africa gave us the creative direction. Jazz could meet amapiano, gospel could sit beside Afro-house, and a new voice could follow a continental star. The differences between the artists were not something to smooth out, they were the identity of Y’ello Tracks.
I never wanted the catalogue to present African music as though the continent possessed one sound. What interested me was precisely the opposite: the extraordinary number of musical worlds that could exist beside one another.
A show with Linda Sikhakhane could sit next to one with Kamo Mphela, even though the way I approached the cameras, staging and musical rhythm would be radically different. Joyous Celebration could bring the scale and emotion of gospel into the same catalogue inhabited by Citizen Deep, while Sjava, Focalistic, Musa Keys, Aymos and Sino Msolo could each represent very different dimensions of contemporary South African music.
That diversity became even more powerful as the catalogue expanded geographically. Zuchu, Harmonize, Nandy, Aslay, Marioo, Ommy Dimpoz, Ben Pol, Mwana FA, Young Lunya and Abigail Chamz helped build a strong East African dimension. Azawi, Winnie Nwagi and Vinka added another voice from the region, while Nviiri The Storyteller brought Kenya into the wider catalogue.
Bomb$hell Grenade and Cleo Ice Queen connected Y’ello Tracks with Zambia, while Anita Jaxson, Ammara and Feli Nandi added Zimbabwean voices.
Namibia developed a particularly strong presence through artists and performers including Sally Boss Madam, Chikune, Lioness, Bokkie Ult, Waters, Tate Buti, Yeezir, Ms Gideon, DJ Alba, DJ Kboz, Jericho, DJ Castro and DJ Vuyo.
Cameroon entered the archive through artists including Mimie, Locko, Krys M and Stanley Enow, while CKay brought Nigeria into the growing world. Morgan Heritage connected the catalogue to a wider Black Atlantic music story, carrying reggae’s long cultural dialogue between Africa, the Caribbean and the diaspora into the Y’ello Tracks environment.
Eventually the line-up itself became a kind of map. It was a map drawn through sounds, scenes and artists rather than borders.
I designed the physical stage knowing that, for most of our potential audience, the real Y’ello Tracks stage would be the screen in their hands. Every image had to survive that journey from a large production environment into something intimate enough to hold in your palm.
That understanding had an enormous influence on the way I approached the visual design.
Y’ello Tracks needed to work as a physical live environment, but the ultimate viewing experience might happen on a relatively small screen. A stage that looked spectacular from twenty metres away could become visually meaningless once reduced to the dimensions of a mobile phone. I therefore approached the design with both scales constantly in mind.
The collision of MTN yellow and black became the foundation of the identity, but I pushed that familiar palette into a harder contemporary music language. The Y’ello Tracks wordmark itself reflected the tension between something human and something digital: “Y’ello” retained familiarity and warmth, while the treatment of “Tracks” suggested pixels, screens, movement and music technology. That identity moved directly into the stage architecture. Darkness became part of the composition rather than an empty space waiting to be filled.
Vertical lighting structures created strong graphic lines that remained legible even on smaller screens, while overhead fixtures and carefully controlled beams provided depth and movement. Reflective surfaces allowed light to travel below and around the artists, creating frames with enough dimensionality to feel cinematic even when viewed through a phone.
The stage could feel expansive in a wide shot and intensely personal a few seconds later when the director cut to the artist’s face. That relationship between scale and intimacy became crucial.
We might be imagining a stadium of more than 300 million connected people, but each individual person would often experience the performance alone, holding a screen only centimetres away from their face.
That was the creative paradox at the heart of the format: design for a stadium-sized audience while making the experience feel as though the artist is performing directly to one person.
I wanted the viewer to feel the cameras moving them through the music, from the scale of the stage into the smallest expression on an artist’s face, so that watching on a phone could still feel immersive, cinematic and emotionally immediate.
The multi-camera approach allowed me to construct that sense of movement. Rather than presenting the performance through one dominant viewpoint, Y’ello Tracks could continuously change the viewer’s relationship with the artist. The wide camera established the scale of the stage; a medium shot allowed us to experience the performer’s physicality; close-ups brought the audience into expressions and details; specialist angles could isolate musicians, instruments, decks or interactions between performers.
Because I was simultaneously directing and showcalling the productions, I could think about how the entire event moved rather than simply choosing pictures after the fact. Lighting changes, performance transitions, entrances, musical developments and technical cues all became part of the visual rhythm of the filmed show.
The cameras were not simply observing the performance. They were moving the audience through it.
That became especially important for the DJs and electronic performers in the catalogue. Citizen Deep, Lebza the Villian, DJ Lash T, FKA Mash, Pascal & Pearce, Dynamic Soul, DJ Slu, Chymamusique, DJ Alba, DJ Kboz, DJ Castro and DJ Vuyo did not perform through the same physical language as a vocalist standing at the front of a band.
Their artistry might live in concentration, the movement of hands across equipment, an interaction between collaborators or the subtle change in energy as one musical passage moved into another. The high-end multi-camera approach allowed us to reveal those details, while the lighting and stage environment created visual momentum around the performance.
I wanted someone watching a DJ set through their phone to feel that they were being taken inside the performance rather than simply observing a person standing behind decks.
The same philosophy applied to sound. For a premium music experience, beautiful pictures alone are meaningless if the music itself feels thin or distant. The audio therefore had to be treated with the same seriousness as the cinematography.
The multi-track high-definition recording of each performance gave us the ability to capture the constituent parts of the music individually: lead vocals, backing vocals, drums, percussion, instruments, electronic elements and the other components of the performance. Those recordings could then be mixed with much greater control and precision than would have been possible from a simple live stereo feed.
That made the on-demand experience substantially more powerful. The viewer could be watching on a phone, tablet, computer or connected screen, but the intention remained to give them something that felt like premium music rather than an incidental recording of an event.
It also created another layer of lasting value for the artist. The audio recording could continue to exist independently from the visual show, meaning one performance generated both a premium film and a professionally captured musical asset.
The image and the sound therefore worked together as two equal halves of the Y’ello Tracks experience.
For me, the live show was the ignition point. One thirty-minute performance could become a premium film, individual songs, high-definition recordings, digital stories and an entire on-demand content journey that kept the artist alive on the platform long after the final note.
The most important part of the ecosystem began when the performance ended. A traditional concert creates enormous energy around a specific time and place. Once that moment passes, much of the investment disappears with it. Y’ello Tracks was designed so that the performance could continue generating creative value.
The complete show became the hero experience. Individual songs could then live separately, allowing audiences to discover a particular performance without necessarily committing first to the full set. Short-form edits could move through social media. Photographs and visual assets could support the artist and the campaign. The professionally recorded music created another set of possibilities entirely. The audience journey could therefore begin almost anywhere.
Someone might encounter a fifteen- or thirty-second moment on a phone. That clip could lead them to the full song. The song could lead them to the complete Y’ello Tracks performance. The performance could lead them towards the artist’s catalogue.
Every piece of content became a doorway into another.
That was the content ecosystem I wanted to build.
The live premiere created immediacy and collective experience; the on-demand catalogue ensured that the value of the performance did not disappear once the live moment had passed. Together they transformed Y’ello Tracks into something closer to an always-open digital venue.
The creative breakthrough for me was imagining MTN’s connected audience as one enormous stadium: more than 300 million potential fans, no physical walls, no last row of seats, with the artist’s stage arriving directly through the phone in each person’s hand.
That image became one of the most powerful ways of understanding the scale of the idea.
Imagine attempting to build a physical stadium large enough for more than 300 million people. The idea is impossible in concrete and steel. There would be no venue capable of containing it and no stage visible from the furthest seat. But connectivity changes the mathematics of the experience.
The stadium no longer needs walls.
The subscriber becomes the audience member.
The network becomes the architecture connecting them.
And the phone becomes the stage.
That was where I saw the deeper power of the MTN relationship. Telecommunications infrastructure could become cultural infrastructure. The network could carry African artists into an audience vastly larger than anything a conventional live venue could accommodate, while the intimacy of the mobile phone meant the final experience could still feel personal.
It also opened the possibility of connecting performance directly with music discovery. The Y’ello Tracks architecture explored pathways into MTN music services such as CallerTunez and into artists’ wider music stores and catalogues, creating an audience journey that could move naturally from watching a song to engaging with the artist beyond the show. A person might enter through the performance, but the relationship did not need to end there.
I wanted Y’ello Tracks to give artists more than exposure. The stage, the cameras, the recording and the audience all had to create real value, while the music at the heart of that value remained with the artist who created it.
The distinction between ownership of Y’ello Tracks and ownership of the artists’ music was fundamental to the way I developed the format. I created and own the Y’ello Tracks intellectual property, editorial proposition and creative system, but I did not believe the value of the platform should depend on taking away the music that gave it meaning. The artist proposition was designed around performers retaining ownership of their live and on-demand performance content, publishing and master recordings within the original model.
That philosophy was particularly important for independent and developing artists, because the production environment itself represented something many would find difficult to finance independently. High-end multi-camera production, sophisticated lighting and stage design, professional audio engineering, multi-track high-definition recording and post-production all carry substantial costs.
By bringing those elements together inside Y’ello Tracks, I wanted an emerging artist to experience the same fundamental production seriousness as a much more established name.
The difference in audience size outside the room should not automatically determine the quality of what happened inside it. That principle influenced the visual treatment, the audio, the length of the performance and the way the artist was positioned editorially. If somebody had been selected to star in a Y’ello Tracks show, then for that performance the creative environment belonged to them.
That, to me, was meaningful artist development: giving people access to the real professional environment rather than asking them to wait until they were already successful before they could experience it.
The production architecture was designed to make that opportunity repeatable. I did not want Y’ello Tracks to exist only as one large annual event around a handful of headline artists. The longer-term model was based on dedicated production days in which a sophisticated camera, lighting, sound and stage environment could remain in place while multiple individual artist shows moved through it.
That created enormous efficiency without reducing the creative standard. The technical infrastructure remained premium, but each artist could still receive their own show and their own performance identity. The model envisaged principal production Saturdays each month, with several individual artist shows created across each production day and the capacity to build towards more than 120 artists and bands across a year.
It also made the IP naturally scalable across the continent.
The Y’ello Tracks production philosophy could move between markets without asking the music itself to become standardised. Johannesburg did not have to sound like Nairobi.
Nairobi did not need to resemble Dar es Salaam. Lagos, Windhoek, Lusaka, Kigali or Kampala could each bring their own scenes, languages and musical identities into the same underlying production architecture.
The infrastructure could travel.
The culture could remain completely itself.
One performance captures an artist in a moment. Ninety-seven shows begin to capture a generation — the stars, the emerging voices, the DJs, the musicians and the sounds moving through African culture around us.
When I consider what went into producing one Y’ello Tracks show and multiply that process across the 97 recorded show entries in the catalogue, the scale of the work becomes clearer. Every edition required artist preparation, editorial development, technical planning, stage configuration, lighting, audio engineering, multi-camera direction, showcalling, multi-track recording and the transformation of the resulting material into a wider body of premium live and on-demand content.
Repeated across Mimie, Anita Jaxson, Azawi, Sjava, Winnie Nwagi, Zikhona, Phila Dlozi, Vinka, Linda Sikhakhane, Nomculo, Shekhinah, Black Motion, Focalistic, Manu WorldStar, Buhle Womculo, Bomb$hell Grenade, Citizen Deep, The Rabbi Himself, Yasirah, Lungelo Moyo, Bobbi Fallon, Joyous Celebration, Nanette, Morgan Heritage, Lebza the Villian, Musa Keys, The Assembly ZA, Zipheko, Kamo Mphela, Albert Frost, Ashley Hilton, DJ Lash T, Thoko, Thando, Kidd969, Yanga Yaya, Monica Magwana, Cleo Ice Queen, Smanga, Bylwansta, FKA Mash, Kea Zawadi, Ammo Moses, Dotcom, Pascal & Pearce, Dynamic Soul, DJ Slu, Sally Boss Madam, Jack Parow, Chikune, John Tsenoli, Money Ostrich, Zameka, Lioness, Bokkie Ult, Waters, JRTheeKing, Ammara, Sino Msolo, Aymos, Neekstro, Chymamusique, Czar Odriego, Teekay Mxoexic, Erica Da Silva, DJ Alba, Punk Mbedzi, Anzo, Siyanqoba Mthethwa, Zaricia Zacheus, Tate Buti, Yeezir, Ms Gideon, Young Lunya, DJ Kboz, CKay, Locko, Krys M, Nviiri The Storyteller, Jay Em, Jericho, Mzwake Ngubeni, DJ Castro and DJ Vuyo, together with the return editions contained within the schedule, Y’ello Tracks became far more than a sequence of production days.
It became an archive.
Within that archive sit major African stars and performers still building their audiences, national favourites and independent voices, singers, instrumentalists, DJs and producers.
That mixture has always mattered to me because an archive consisting only of famous people tells you who had already succeeded. An archive that captures the artists still becoming tells you what the culture itself was doing.
And because each performance was captured through premium multi-camera imagery and high-definition multi-track audio rather than merely documented casually, those shows preserved far more than the existence of a song.
They preserved how an artist performed it, how musicians interacted, how the stage felt, what the visual culture looked like and something of the atmosphere surrounding African music at that moment.
One show preserves a memory.
Ninety-seven begin to preserve an era.
When I think about Y’ello Tracks now, I return to the original image of the stage and the audience. An artist walks into the light carrying their music and their story. Around them, we build a world: stage architecture, lighting, high-end cameras and multi-track high-definition sound. The performance begins live, carrying the immediacy of that particular moment, while every camera and every audio channel is simultaneously preserving it for another audience and another time.
Somewhere else, somebody lifts a phone. The stage arrives in their hand.
They may be ten kilometres away or ten thousand. They may be watching at the exact moment the artist performs or entering the show months later through the on-demand catalogue.
The physical distance between them becomes almost irrelevant because the creative experience has been designed specifically to make that connection possible. Multiply that person across MTN’s audience of more than 300 million connected subscribers, and the metaphorical stadium becomes enormous.
There are no upper tiers, no obstructed views and no final row disappearing into the horizon. There are simply millions of individual screens capable of becoming a direct line between artist and audience.
That is the scale at which I imagined Y’ello Tracks. Yet the ambition was always to make that enormous scale feel intimate. The show still belonged to one artist. The camera could still find one expression. The microphone could still capture one breath before the first note. A viewer could still feel as though the performance were happening for them.
That tension between vast reach and intimate experience became the heart of the property: a premium live and on-demand African music ecosystem in which high-end multi-camera film, multi-track high-definition sound, mobile connectivity and artist ownership came together around one simple human act, somebody making music, and somebody else experiencing it.
The technology made the stadium possible.The phone became the stage.But the artist remained the reason anyone came to watch.
Y’ELLO TRACKS with MTN
Building an African Music Content Ecosystem: One Artist, One Show, One Original Performance at a Time
Jandré Louw
Creator & Owner
Y’ello Tracks Intellectual Property
Creator
Original Editorial Concept & Content Format
Executive Producer
Creative Director
Director: Content Ecosystem & Digital Media
Director: Filmed Performances & Live Events
Head of Production & Staging
Showcaller
Stage & Set Designer
Creator & Designer: Y’ello Tracks Logo & Brand Identity
Creative Director: Campaign Identity All Platforms
Creative Direction: Premium Live & On-Demand Content
Creative Direction: Multi-Camera Filmed Performances
CAMPAIGN PARTNER
MTN
Strategic Brand Partner
Telecommunications & Connectivity Partner
Mobile Audience Ecosystem Partner
Music & Digital Distribution Ecosystem Partner
MTN’s role within the concept extended beyond conventional sponsorship, providing the connectivity framework through which Y’ello Tracks could imagine the mobile network itself as part of the audience experience, with MTN’s vast subscriber base representing the potential virtual stadium and the mobile phone becoming the individual screen and stage through which audiences could enter each performance.
Editorial Focus
African artists, live performance, artist discovery, premium live and on-demand music experiences, high-end multi-camera production, multi-track audio recording, digital distribution, mobile connectivity and artist-centred content creation.
ARTISTS
Featuring Y’ello Tracks artist and DJ line-up:
Mimie, Anita Jaxson, Azawi, Sjava, Winnie Nwagi, Zikhona, Phila Dlozi, Vinka, Linda Sikhakhane, Nomculo, Shekhinah, Black Motion, Focalistic, Manu WorldStar, Buhle Womculo, Bomb$hell Grenade, Citizen Deep, The Rabbi Himself, Yasirah, Lungelo Moyo, Bobbi Fallon, Joyous Celebration, Nanette, Morgan Heritage, Lebza the Villian, Musa Keys, The Assembly ZA, Zipheko, Kamo Mphela, DJ Lash T, Thoko, Thando, Kidd969, Yanga Yaya, Monica Magwana, Cleo Ice Queen, Smanga, Bylwansta, FKA Mash, Kea Zawadi, Ammo Moses, Dotcom, Albert Frost, Ashley Hilton, Pascal & Pearce, Dynamic Soul, DJ Slu, Sally Boss Madam, Chikune, John Tsenoli, Money Ostrich, Zameka, Lioness, Bokkie Ult, Waters, JRTheeKing, Ammara, Sino Msolo, Aymos, Neekstro, Chymamusique, Czar Odriego, Teekay Mxoexic, Feli Nandi, Erica Da Silva, DJ Alba, Punk Mbedzi, Anzo, Siyanqoba Mthethwa, Zaricia Zacheus, Tate Buti, Yeezir, Ms Gideon, Young Lunya, DJ Kboz, CKay, Locko, Krys M, Nviiri The Storyteller, Jay Em, Jericho, Mzwake Ngubeni, DJ Castro and DJ Vuyo, with returning Y’ello Tracks editions by artists including Focalistic, Joyous Celebration, Monica Magwana and Morgan Heritage, forming the wider 97-show Y’ello Tracks performance catalogue.
WITH THANKS
The artists, musicians, DJs, producers, technical crews, camera teams, sound engineers, lighting teams, production teams, staging crews, post-production teams, digital teams and everyone who contributed to bringing each individual Y’ello Tracks performance to life.
MTN, for the partnership and the connective vision that allowed Y’ello Tracks to imagine the African music stage at a radically different scale, not simply as a physical venue, but as a connected experience capable of travelling directly into the hands of audiences across the continent.
Photography Note: All photographs reproduced in this publication originate from original images taken at the time of the events depicted. Some source files are small or of very limited or low resolution because they were captured many years ago using early-generation Nokia, Motorola and BlackBerry mobile handsets, whose cameras had significantly lower image-quality and resolution capabilities than those available today. Where necessary, selected photographs have been enlarged, upscaled, depixelated and resolution-enhanced to improve clarity and presentation. AI-assisted tools were used solely for these technical restoration and display purposes. No people, objects, settings or material visual content were added, removed or generatively altered; the photographs remain faithful to the original moments as they were captured as the actual photographs.