Are Off Centre Dept releasing music faster than we can listen?

By Farai Mudzingwa

I have to start by acknowledging that I’m a big believer in quantity over quality. In fact, I hold the
belief that quantity precedes quality and that constantly working (and publishing) the stuff that you work on as an artist is what leads to positive outcomes.

Whilst I hold this belief I must say I’m pretty curious to know at what point you tip the scales and start publishing too much content. The trigger for this question is Off Centre Dept and their two flagship artists - Icey Ekxne and Slyme Foxx.

When Icey and Slyme burst onto the scene in 2022 with their 10-track EP Practise and the catchy lead song Tafara, I was hooked. The production was exciting, the writing sharp and playful and the lead single had an engaging video.

I felt a lot of the key ingredients for something special were (and maybe still are) there, but two and a half years later I hardly pay attention to anything the artists put out.

It’s not because I think the music is worse off now than it was back then but in reality I’ve grown
weary because OCD artists put out so much music it’s become hard to keep up with…

In 2024, it was particularly hard to keep up with OCD artists as Slyme Foxx was the leading feature artist in 50 songs! Icey’s output of 23 songs looks better by comparison but it’s only because the artist fell out with OCD and wasn’t a part of their stable for a portion of the year.

This also ignores the fact that 23 songs is still a respectable volume of music for an artist to be putting out in one year. Lain is the OCD artist that looked like a shift in strategy as she only participated in 10 songs last year, but in 2025 she’s keeping up with the pace of Slyme and Icey which suggests that her lower output might have been circumstantial and not necessarily a shift in strategy…

The visual above ultimately means that in the first 3 years of their careers, Icey and Slyme have published 74 and 86 songs respectively which makes me wonder, how common is this and
then something we will touch on later - how effective is it?

How common is this?

To establish if this is indeed as rare as I and some others feel we’re going to look at some of
the established Zim Hip Hop mainstays that have come before and see how much music they
published in the first three years of their career:

It’s quite clear that Slyme and Icey are more prolific than the star acts of the genre where at
similar phases of their careers but I was pleasantly surprised to see Saintfloew’s activity. I didn’t
expect that.

Another pleasant surprise here was the emergence of Bling4 as an artist only entering his third career year - if we’re going by the music uploaded to his Bling4 Spotify page.

Yes, these artists probably recorded (and maybe even published) a bunch of music under other names or distributed it on separate pages but that’s too hard to find and the music wasn’t
impactful enough so we’re using their current brands as the point of reference.

An example of what I mean here is that the music Bagga published as Volt Bahgamasy as he was known
earlier isn’t counted as part of the songs participated in metric illustrated above…

Long-winded explanations aside, the emergence of Bling4 is important though because it gives
us an apples to apples comparison of an artist who is operating on similar timelines as Slyme and Icey but getting different results as we’ll see in the next section.

How effective is the strategy?

All this begs the question, how effective is this as a strategy? The data I have on Zimbabwean
artists isn’t back dated enough to do an apples to apples comparison of how many
followers/listeners these artists had after their 3rd year so we’ll have to rely strongly on how
Bling 4 compares to his peers from OCD.

I understand that music is not a game of science but it is fair to say that Bling4 has been highly
effective at converting listeners to fans as he’s managed to grow his Spotify follower count to 26,000+ followers from 28 releases.

It’s also fair to acknowledge that a sample size of 3 artists is tiny and can’t be taken as a trend but it is fair to question just how effective OCD’s strategy of flooding the market is.

Granted, I started this piece complaining and have an active bias against said strategy as I feel overwhelmed by it but I do think beyond my own bias there are some issues that we can objectively raise regarding this strategy.

Fan conversion rate is another metric we can look at in this conversation. Spotify’s fan
conversion rate measures the percentage of listeners who engage deeply with an artist's
content, such as saving their music, following their profile, or frequently streaming their songs.

In more basic terms it reflects how effectively an artist is turning casual listeners into
dedicated fans. This is what the numbers look like when we look at Bling4, Icey and Slyme:

Ordinarily there’s no point in looking at fan conversion rates that represent 1 month but in this
case the numbers are supposed to be in OCDs advantage as their artists have already released
9 songs each this year but you can see that the numbers are still lower by comparison…

My biggest point of contention with the current sweatshop approach is that marketing resources are finite and should be used wisely. There is a version of events where instead of putting out new music every fortnight, the hardest hitting songs that come from OCD could instead get a lot more marketing spend and attention - thus increasing chances of the songs scaling and
reaching more people. Slyme Foxx’s song, Hip Hip Hure illustrates this.

It is currently the most popular song on his Spotify page with 47,485 plays but it has no video whilst other songs from the album that had less listenership got videos. I suspect this might be because the videos were shot prior to the album launch and by the time Hip Hip Hure proved to be popular, Slyme and OCD were already working on new music!

Let’s not act like there’s no silver lining to all this!

As is usually the case, it’s also important to acknowledge that there’s a lot of positive upside to
OCDs flood-the-market strategy. As more songs and videos are produced, more money flows to
producers, videographers and the musicians to practice as we noted before.

Icey and Slyme have also managed to grow their personal brands with respectable followings of 12.8k and 16.2k respectively on Instagram giving them decently-sized platforms through which to directly communicate with their fanbases.

OCD has also given their artists platform and opportunity to collaborate with much biggers acts as collaborations with Saintfloew, Bagga, Nyasha David etc have all worked with OCD.

Beyond the size of the acts they have fostered a lot of creativity among artists within and beyond their stable of artists, hosting camps where producers, videographers, vocalists all come together in one location for a set period of time to make music.

All these are positives that will help grow Hip Hop in Zimbabwe in some way or another, but in
2025 I hope for my own sake (which is maybe a bit selfish) that Slyme Foxx and Icey Ekxne
slow down a bit and give us time to actually take the music in…