Album Talks’ ‘Release Cal’ Seeks to Make Tracking New Music Easier

“What if we had a calendar for music drops?” This was the initial thought on Emmanuel Zhajj Onwunaru’s mind when he was ideating Release Cal, a tracker for Nigerian music project releases. ‘Zhajj’, as he is mostly known by music enthusiasts on X and other industry insiders, is the Founder and CEO of Nigerian music hub, Album Talks. On 28 September 2026, the hub invited the world to partake of their latest product, Release Cal, a free-to-use tool to track new projects directly synced to mobile device calendars. 

Much like the rest of the world, Nigeria’s music scene operates at a fast-pace that’s quite difficult for the average person to keep up with. While there isn’t available data on the volume of music released each year, unlike with Nollywood, revenue analysis from the IFPI Global Music Report 2026 and from distribution platforms like Spotify, indicate consistent increase in volume in the past year. The former reported that Sub-Saharan Africa recorded music revenue growth of about 15.2% in 2015, the joint second-fastest-growing music market in the world—although, South Africa represented 78.1% of that figure, with Nigeria next in line. Spotify reportedly distributed ₦60 billion in royalties in 2025 with streams totalling 30 billion. Since 2022 (81), at least 112 projects have debuted on TurnTable Charts’ Top Album Charts, indicating a steady large volume of releases. This is even as album culture holds steady within the cultural zeitgeist, quality decline notwithstanding. 

As such, Zhajj believes this can help music enthusiasts track their favourite projects better. A surprising inspiration for the project was Manchester United’s fixture calendar model, which combined with “complaints from music listeners’ inability to keep up,” or “even altogether miss important projects by acts whose music they’re interested in,” prompted Release Cal. While streaming platforms like Spotify have updates on forthcoming projects, said updates aren’t as user-friendly, recurring only if projects are pre-saved to one’s library or if a user has followed the artist. From the reactions so far, the tool appears to be filling a tangible gap for music insiders, with Zhajj sharing that “it’s not every day you get to create a tool really appreciated by insiders more.”  This writer tested out the tool and the entire sync process took just 3 minutes, with privacy settings still in check. 

Album Talks, which was founded in 2019, joins Nigerian film and TV publication, WhatKeptMeUp, in providing release-calendar services. The latter’s ‘Film and TV Kept Me Up’ tool had over 300 users as of May. Both represent a consistent trend in new considerations of the needs of media consumers beyond the now almost mandatory newsletters. Culture Custodian’s podcast slate (With An S, Carnivores, Overnight Success, Uncultured, Submarine and A Roach, 4th Republic) alongside other products and tools by Nigerian publications, emerged from this vacuum as well. 

As an aside, there’s a lot to be said about the archetype of ‘the audience’ that exists today. With so many creators competing for attention, and innovating new ways to capture and retain said attention, it’s hard to tell just how much is too much. The media is proliferating at an exponential rate. Outlets that are able to maintain a level of trust with their audience with regard to recommendations will become even more important as consumerism deepens. And Zhajj wants Album Talks to be one of such hubs. “The long term goal [of Release Cal] definitely aligns with what we already do. We want people to come across anything by Album Talks and immediately want to get on their music streaming apps and listen to music. We’ll be starting with project releases, and maybe expand into a general releases kind of thing sometime in the future,” he concludes.