The Case For Music Industry Gatekeepers

The average Afrobeats enthusiast is all too familiar with the narrative of an artist pushing back against industry gatekeepers. It’s one of the most popular tropes of the genre. In Rema’s Ozeba, he sings “Shey you wan gatekeep who sabi jump fence?” It’s cheeky and whimsical but also bristling with a cavalier tenor. You can almost picture him wagging his fingers irreverently at his antagonists as he intones those words. In a sense this kind of rhetoric in Afrobeats is metaphorical, a nod to the very Nigerian belief in phantom and often malevolent forces that need to be kept at bay with forceful warnings (affirmations, prayers, or chants). In Achebe’s seminal Things Fall Apart, Ekwefi follows Chinelo, the priestess of Agbala, who had taken Ezinma to the oracle, we see Ekwefi who is gripped by a fear of unknown forces, utter affirmations to both steady herself mentally and ward off malevolent forces.

But this trope of wrestling with gatekeepers, which we hear in Afrobeats all the time, also speaks to a literal situation. Every industry has its gatekeepers and the Nigerian music industry is no exception. Certain people hold disproportionate influence over what happens in the industry and can significantly throttle an artist if they so wish. Over the years, we’ve seen several artists lament about being blackballed by certain industry forces. In 2000, late Onyeka Onwenu, famously  went on a hunger strike and a public crusade, after the then-NTA DG Murray-Bruce barred her from television. More recently, in 2024, Oxlade claimed to be blacklisted by “gatekeepers”—everyone from radio stations to playlist curators on streaming services. 

But for all the talk of gatekeepers that pervades Afrobeats today, it’s much harder to gatekeep in our day, compared to even just a decade again. The reasons for this are manifold but social media and the rise of streaming platforms are the biggest drivers of this shift. A decade ago, the industry was fiercely guarded by record labels, radio, and TV stations, and blogs like NotJustOk and Linda Ikeji Blog, which served as digital tastemakers. Today, the situation is radically different. Labels still hold some sway but their influence pales in comparison to the past decade and seems to be in increasing decline. Major labels struggle to break new artists and the share of buzzing artists signed to labels (especially local labels) continues to sharply decline. Blogs have become obsolete, run aground by the shift of conversations to social media. 

There are still gatekeepers today, streaming platform curators decide who gets on major playlists like Hot Hits Naija, African Heat, or New Music Friday. These placements drive millions of streams and can be the deciding factor in whether a song takes off or not. But for all the power they wield, the industry today is too diffuse to be shaped by any one power bloc. Artists can be blackballed by playlist curators and still score hits. Take Naira Marley’s Pxy Drip which barely received any placements on playlists. Despite the song’s exclusion from playlists, it still gained immense popularity, to the point where it stirred profound conversations about the effectiveness of cancel culture. 

While this putative democratization of the music industry might seem like a good thing—and in many ways it is—it’s not without its flaws. As the influence of tastemakers—radio and television personnel as well as culture shapers—wanes, algorithms and social media influencers have become increasingly crucial in shaping the soundscape. One result of this is that the overall quality of popular music has declined. Scoring a hit today is less about delivering quality music than knowing how to game the system. This problem is so entrenched that many disaffected fans routinely refer to 2016 as the peak of music globally. While this assessment might be needlessly hysterical it makes one wonder if this supposed democratization of the industry simply means we traded one tyrannical structure for another one.