Conversations have swamped the internet concerning afrobeats’ cultural takeover in 2020, all that it meant for its creators funding-wise and how that cash inflow seems to have been cut short following bad investments.
The image of the system Nigeria’s music space ran on before the COVID year has become so blurry. Perhaps because when the globalization of the culture happened in 2020, so many foreign investors scrambled their ways into the market; each one fighting to have a piece of the control pie.
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International labels established offices in West Africa, signed record deals with fast-rising artists and the continent’s superstars likewise, and changed everything about what the system knew production, rollout, marketing and branding to be.
Some of these big buyers included Universal Music Group, Interscope, Def Jam, Sony Music to mention a few. Today, there are loose talks about mismanagement of funds by local reps, the dollar influx doing more harm than good for the game, and how new generation artists have so much more work to do before gaining access to these monies.
For example, lately there have been many more comments about how emerging artists need to have built a community with little-to-no access to capital in order for labels to take them seriously. One could argue that as of 2020, this wasn’t the case.
Perhaps due to the advent of platforms like TikTok post-COVID, many more music creators have gained popular attention across board, yet not so many of them get international label backing; a phenomenon that can easily be attributed to oversaturation of the space.
So do new generation artists have it harder?
Well, yes. In some ways. The bar is definitely higher. Artists now need to have an actively growing community, identity, data, story, and maybe even capital. Labels now seek more to develop than simply to discover and blow up.
However in some other ways, things definitely are better. With direct-to-fan platforms, distribution independence and other AI aid tools, global audiences are a lot more possible even without label support.
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Essentially, the industry isn’t throwing money at potential alone, but is now betting on micro proof to be amplified. Could the market be said to be “correcting” itself? Or is this just repercussion from poor financial decisions earlier made?
Itty can be caught studying African pop culture, writing about it or hosting a relationship podcast. When he's not doing any of these, then he's definitely at a bar, getting mocktail.
