Considering how far the Nigerian music industry has come and the hustle the artistes have withstood, every hard working entertainer putting in the shifts deserves all the glory and success that comes their way from Africa and the international scene, but with caution.

Looking back, to imagine the pain the industry was subjected to after major record companies like the EMI and Sony music (which changed to CBS) shut down and left the shores of Nigeria due to the Nigerianization policy, and the craziness attributed to makeshift music markets from Lasamu to Alaba, it will be lunacy not to understand the frenzy that comes with every artiste who signed international recording deals but painfully, that alone over the years has not translated to success for most of the home-grown Nigerian entertainers that have gone that route despite the fact that there was a lot of money and fame involved. I guess there’s a lot to learn from artistes that indirectly gave up the creative control of their content and by so doing, lost their originality and lost their home based fans. They struggle to cement new audience and at the end of the day, their career became stagnant.

There’s nothing wrong with an artiste experimenting and trying out new markets. To be candid, that is a necessity but doing all that at the detriment of losing your trade secret (sound) and the audience that created the base that attracted the international recording company to pick interest in your brand, for me, is unacceptable. The best we had of Majek Fashek was before his deal with Interscope Records (forget the other drama) while the most famous of KSA was before and after Island Records. It seems Davido got the memo along the way as he took control of his content (he stated this much in various interviews) and the result was the monster hit titled ‘If’. Davido went back to the basics; the result is the magic unfolding. If Davido got it right, other artistes should and can do better! The Africa music market will inevitably become invincible and we will be a force to be reckon with.

Words by Sesan Adeniji for Mystreetz Magazine