Sino Msolo Opens Up About Feeling Overshadowed While Working With Popular Artists. Sino’s first call to fame came in 2019, when as a member of acclaimed producer and record executive Sun-El Musician’s El World Music stable, he released his debut album Mamela. The album achieved mild mainstream success, but served a valuable introduction – for him – into the industry as a protégé of Sun-El, who was at the time enjoying a scorching run as the country’s top Afro-House producer. After a while, Sino realised that he had hit a glass ceiling and needed to leave the label to chart his own path in order to reach the next level.
Sino has worked with multiple industry stars including Sun-El, De Mthuda, 9umba, Toss, and many others. While of course it gave him a platform to be known, he also felt overshadowed. He also opened up about Amapiano leaks where songs would be leaked through WhatsApp. At times, these leaks are merely a ploy by artists to gauge whether their music will resonate with audiences, while in other instances they happen inadvertently as a result of songs being loosely shared on WhatsApp.
“At times, it kind of helps because you can tell if a song is gonna be a hit or not. But at the same time, it’s a disadvantage to unknown artists because even if your name is there, people won’t [notice] that you are featured; they’ll just focus on the person they know, which in my case was De Mthuda,” he said.
“Everyone was talking about De Mthuda and not me, which was unfortunate for me. I was like, ‘How am I gonna make it to these people so they can see that it’s me?’,” he added. In his quest to attach himself to the song’s success, Sino’s strategy was to post videos of himself singing it, a tactic that gradually helped increase his visibility. With ‘Jola’ blazing a trail, Sino went on to form a major part of De Mthuda’s album, The Landlord, which was arguably the standout Amapiano project of 2021. Apart from ‘Jola’, Sino was also featured on project highlights ‘Mhlaba Wonke’ and ‘Double Double’.
Today, he has some of the biggest amapiano songs in the country. He linked with DJ Slade to create an Amapiano banger titled ‘Wamuhle’. He also linked up with Musa Keys, for whom he delivered brilliant cameo appearances on his Tayo album standouts ‘Wena’ and ‘Thando Lwam’. He was also featured on Mas Musiq’s ‘Gwinya Lam’ and DJ Ganyani’s ‘Emakhaya’ late in the year, before kicking off 2022 with a feature on the first viral Amapiano song of the year, 9umba’s ‘uMlando’.
