In Search of Archives for Nigerian Pop Music

When one of contemporary black music’s most important voices, D’Angelo, passed in October 2025, after an extended battle with cancer, the internet was awash with footage from his performances. Fans took turns basking in the fading light of a legend gone too soon and one of many emergent conversations was about preserving his legacy via archives. In the course of these discussions, there was a mild fracas on X, many users piling on, and supporting, DJ Short, a white American digital archivist who had spent time archiving D’Angelo’s work, subsequently monetising this rare collection. His critics hinted at the optics of a white DJ controlling access to the works of an artist like D’Angelo, whose music often criticised such ‘white saviour complexes,’ while others argued that the gap wasn’t filled by many black individuals, to begin with. 

Earlier in August, while the Peter, Paul, and Jude Okoye spat raged on, clips from the brothers’ early years as P-Square enjoyed new leases of life. They covered everything from their campus tours to behind the scenes recordings, including a rather hilarious footage from the session for Enemy Solo, their 2015 smash hit with Congolese icon, Awilo Logomba. However, unlike the D’Angelo episode, there was a noticeable disorder to how these videos emerged and were catalogued. With the former, links to YouTube channels with extensive meta data, articles, and other repositories were in excess supply. Fans of P-Square instead had to depend on the benevolence of social media pages dedicated to archiving these materials, most of which thrive on nostalgia, often misrepresenting information as they carry out their activities. Waving this aside as a non-issue might seem to be a choice we can afford. On the contrary, what we have is a fractured relationship with the past, showing up in how we deal with the present and prepare for the future. 

Of course, there are multiple reasons why Nigerian  music lacks both generalised and niche archives. As with the US and elsewhere, the rapid transitions between media formats erased so much in so little time, that in the absence of institutional efforts, so much material faded out rather rapidly. In his Open Country Mag profile, US-based Nigerian critic, Ikhide Ikheloa lamented losing over 150 articles and essays on Nigerian literature, politics, and identity, after the collapse of Next. And this was still an originally online publication, talk more of several others that never transitioned from physical print, or the media itself—music, in this case—stuck in VHS, CD, and DVD formats. P-Square reportedly put out music video EPs, like Tempted 2 Watch Da Videos II and Take Over Da Videos during their heydays. And were it not for the rise of YouTube in the 2010s, perhaps even more standard versions of these videos—not the dubbed, excessively grainy survivors—would have made it to the video-watching platform. You see this in the nature of the channels on which many of our music videos and recordings arrive, random usernames of lowercase letters and even more random digits. 

Additionally, because the music industry was itself rapidly adapting to changes, as was the media, many initiatives didn’t arrive until much later. Up until TurnTable Charts’ emergence in 2020, there wasn’t a single unified chart system for Nigerian music, nor were certifications issued.  And with the extent of musical history, that has denied us of many great records. Prince Nico Mbarga and Rocafill Jazz’s 1976 hit record, Sweet Mother, is decidedly more ubiquitous as the ‘mother’s day song’ than Christy Essien Igbokwe’s Seun Rere ever was or Sunny Nneji and Evi-Edna Ogholi’s respective Happy Birthday tracks were to birthday parties, at their peak. And this isn’t just because of anecdotal popularity. Sweet Mother reportedly sold about 13 million copies, according to Narratively, and even at its smallest estimation, 3 million. Diamond before Billboard Charts even recognised Diamond records, and by a Nigerian record label, Rogers All Stars, no less. In fact, the record was initially rejected by major foreign labels in Nigeria at the time, Decca, EMI, and Philip Records. 

Sir Shina Peters’ Ace (Afro Juju Series 1) (1989) and Shinamania (1990) albums supposedly sold 5 million and 7 million copies, respectively. It’s one of many reasons, along with true monocultural appeal that has made a music historian like The Jide Taiwo crown SSP Nigeria’s greatest popstar. Then first lady Mariam Babangida distributed copies of his album as part of her Better Life Scheme. He supposedly sold 20 million copies of his projects released between 1989 and 1992. There were the awards too, including carting away the big three categories—Song, Artist, and Album of the Year—at the defunct Nigerian Music Awards following Ace’s release. 13 years before that,  teenage Queen Salawa Abeni broke on to the scene with over a million copies sold of her debut album, Late General Murtala Ramat Mohammed. Whether 1976 or 2026, the sheer incredulity of a million copies being moved by a teenage sensation is hard to fathom, and yet, there they were, and here they still are, not adequately recognised in our record-keeping.

Contemporary Nigerian popular music suffered from a similar dearth of unit-tracking up until the mid 2010s. If we’re to work with the anecdotes scattered around the internet, then 2Baba’s Grass 2 Grace sold 500,000 copies barely an hour after its release. M.I Abaga’s Talk About It sold 30,000 copies in 30 minutes. The Alaba magnate supposedly paid about 10, 20, and 60 Million Naira to Burna Boy (L.I.F.E), M.I Abaga (MI2), and P-Square (Game Over) respectively for their albums. It’s not that these figures are hard to believe or next to impossible. In a May 2025 Afrobeats Intelligence interview, Timaya revealed being paid about ₦24 million for his sophomore LP, Gift and Grace. The issue here is that this information can’t be objectively verified—undoubtedly accurate as it might be—and consequently, affects perception of older eras of Nigerian music. 

One thing many fail to realise is that the dissonance when comparing eras within Nigerian music often arises out of this gap in documentation. The obsession with being progenitors and ‘first to’s exists because artists and fans alike lack familiarity with their history. That’s why “Afrobeats to the World” was successful as a term to begin with. We forgot we dominated the world. We forgot that our artists were so monumental on the world stage that the most renowned media conglomerates of our time couldn’t have done without covering their strides. This writer’s favourite example is critic Greg Tate’s 1983 essay, King Sunny Ade: ‘Him Cool, Him Wicked’; Are You Ready for Juju?,” which covered the US leg of KSA’s Synchro System-supporting tour. Or how Majek Fashek appeared on Late Night with David Letterman in 1992, over thirty years before Ayra Starr stormed US late night TV to promote Starrgirl. Tems is a national treasure and one of the most bankable Nigerian act in the West. But she’s miles off the monocultural fame of Onyeka Onwenu, whose star prowess extended to the point of a consensus nickname—not self-assigned, either—aside from other roles serving as the focal point for national programs. Comparison is futile in this instance. At best, either side is diminished on a generational margin in the quest for superiority; at worst, the conversation devolves to a hailstorm of sentimental anecdotes.

The lack of documentation also means that criteria for superstardom and what qualifies as a hit song has evolved multiple times. It’s why arguments agains the possibility of artists like Mavo blowing up in previous eras can hardly arrive in good faith. Nigeria’s music has changed so much in the past 30 years. Whereas R&B acts like Styl-Plus were guaranteed a berth during the early years of Afropop, nowadays R&B acts exist on the fringes of the mainstream. Boombap hip-hop was all it took to be considered an elite rapper until the late 2000s. In the time since, Olamide became the greatest Nigerian rapper of all time, and even he has shelved hardcore spittin‘ completely. Any year in the early 2010s, Chella’s My Darling being as viral as it was, constituted undisputed ‘hit’ status. In 2026, it’s a viral hit, but its cultural capital outside TikTok is negligible. So, if one asks, “Who is a superstar today?” the easier way out would be to fragment the idea of a superstar, being considerate of the circumstances today. There are objective criteria quite all right: record sales, ticket sales from shows, fanbases, foreign penetration, and relevance in pop culture discourse. Factored together, they produce a relative gradient for measuring superstardom (eg. Odumodublvck is objectively more of a superstar than any Nigerian rapper since Olamide). However, this won’t account for niches, communities where a Zaylevelten is godlike, where Seyi Vibez is a religion. But then, we digress. 

There’s the specificity to archives that elevates relationships with the past, which try as we might, journalism and documentaries alone can’t quite compensate for. Archival curation ensures efficient distribution of materials, catalogued contextually for present and future use. In the age of social media, perhaps the closest to this are fan pages with up-to-date documentation and systematic posts with ties to dates, events, musical genre history, beefs and clashes, releases, and what not. However, these are more niche, lacking the rigour and intensity of traditional digital archives. Ahead of the fan pages, there are full-on archival pages, mostly dedicated to harvesting nostalgia bucks. The preponderance for misinformation, often capitalising on whatever conversation is in the digisphere at that moment in time. Perhaps the most chronic of these offenders is the X page, Nigerian Stories, far left of others like the Nigerian nostalgia project and nostalgicsound_ng on Instagram. The latter painstakingly includes full-length captions, citing sources of footage and introducing fresh content, as well. What such pages lack in a system, they make up for with distinctive arrangement of material aiding accessibility. 

While we might be convinced to avert blame from institutions and organisations, there’s a lot to be said in how most haven’t managed to develop adequate archives. For instance, there really is no reason why The Headies Awards, two decades later, cannot boast of a substantial, constantly accessible archive. And no, the website doesn’t count. From their time as the physical Hip-Hop World magazine to the tens of thousands of hours of content on Hip TV, the Ayo Animashaun-led corp has enough for a definitive archive. Similarly, shows like Prime Time Africa and AIT Jamz, which ran on still existing TV stations, should ideally have been catalogued for access, beyond #ThrowbackThursday content. But this isn’t the case.  Culture writer Dami Ajayi believes this to be a systemic challenge. “We have a more fundamental problem; we don’t have a proper culture of rigorous documentation. Granted music journalism is a fairly recent discipline, it wasn’t taken seriously in Nigeria from time and was lumped with tabloid/lifestyle/gossip/showbiz journalism,” he begins, adding that,”We also don’t have a culture of musicians writing solid biographies or memoirs. When written, they hardly pass the sniff test in terms of rigour, talk less of passing the high standards of global publishing. Archiving would matter if we had a solid culture of documenting in the first instance.” When this is considered, it becomes even more saddening that the current crop of artists have toed the path of older generations, favouring foreign, short-form documentation over scribes at home with more intimate knowledge of their careers, who are subsequently more likely to offer friction in their journalism. This is not to be conflated with quote-chasing podcasting and gossip blogs. There’s an established culture of music journalism in 2026 spanning multiple formats. Explanations on the altar of professionalism aren’t tenable, as such. 

Ajayi believes that support for the Headies and other key stakeholders is unavoidable if we’re to preserve Nigeria’s music history properly.  “Archivi.ng  is already doing some of this kind of work, but I think they need to sort out specialism as well as improve their search accuracy.” A retrospective database of every Afrobeat song, plus metadata and a directory of every musician, is  achievable per his estimation. One might claim this to be lofty but so was the idea of a standardised chart for Nigerian music, and yet today, TurnTable Charts has extended to four more countries. Government agencies like the Centre for Black and African Arts and Civilisation with expanding physical archives of vinyl records and other memorabilia require, if nothing at all, sustained promotion and awareness. If there ever was a time for journalists and academics to intensify efforts towards preserving history, it is now when this delta is increasingly being filled by charlatans.