If the big question for the Nigerian music industry last year was: “Where are the breakout stars who will suffuse the scene with new life?”; the question that looms over the scene today, with increasing intensity every passing minute, is: what is the latest frontier, the bleeding edge of innovation, regarding music marketing in the Nigerian music industry? It’s a question that feels existential in today’s media age where social media and the ascendance of streaming platforms have upended what had been taken as the immutable laws of music marketing.
Before the age of streaming, music marketing was a straightforward process. This is not to suggest that it was a walk in the park. However, a fitting metaphor for the process then would perhaps be a marathon, in that it was a grueling process but it also presented a single course and held the promise that if one were to put up with the tedium, the tumult, there would be at the end glory, success, euphoria. The current media landscape presents a radically different picture, one in which a horde of players scurry around playing a game whose rules are inscrutable and rapidly changing, or, to borrow the words of Gertrude Stein “One great blooming, buzzing confusion.”
Consider TikTok, which has established itself as a major channel for music marketing and distribution. Now and then, the invisible hand of the platform—to borrow the popular economics epithet—unilaterally selects a viral song, which typically goes on to dominate the zeitgeist. Rema’s Calm Down and Ckay’s Love Nwatiti are prominent examples. What’s most striking about the dynamics of TikTok is that, while theories about what makes a song go viral on the platform abound, the winning formula for engineering a viral song on the platform eludes everyone, artists and label executives included—and this is not for lack of trying. Despite unrelenting efforts from labels, the secret behind a TikTok hit remains elusive. There are certainly identifiable features of a potentially viral song—simple earworm hooks, catchy lyrics, and embellishment with slang. Contriving these features in a song, however, does not guarantee a hit. The likely outcome of trying to artificially optimize a song for TikTok vitality is a record painfully gaudy in quality, terribly bereft of taste, almost perverse, and overtly desperate, in its aspiration for virality.
TikTok isn’t an insular case, far from it, it functions as a microcosm of the broader industry. The rules have changed, the old levers—radio and television—have lost their inexorable power and new models are more difficult to read, increasingly so with every passing moment. As such, artists and labels across the world are on the prowl for new formulas. In the Nigerian music industry, this year, the situation appears to have simmered to a fever pitch, apparently exacerbated by the suffocatingly dense volume of music that gets churned out every day, as well as the unique pressures here, which include the desire to cater to both a local and global audience. And so, artists across the country appear to be searching for new marketing frontiers, to be tinkering and experimenting feverishly with the hopes that something revolutionary will emerge.
Amidst all of these, three main categories in music marketing have emerged. The first is the traditional route: standard media runs—interviews, articles, TV appearances, podcasts, and radio appearances. The second approach has to do with rousing conversations by generating a spectacle. And, the third category comprises a variety of unorthodox approaches—everything from collaborating with streamers to building a cult following on TikTok.
Burna Boy’s promotional efforts for his imminent album, No Sign of Weakness, have mostly found him leaning into spectacle. The idea here is not so much to directly promote anything but to monopolize the attention economy in his favor, so that whatever he puts forward—an album, merch, concert tickets—lands on favorable ground. This approach directly borrows from the influencer playbook of the 2000s through to the 2010s. In that period, influencers, who were at the time a newly minted celebrity class, maintained their grip on the culture through carefully executed stunts, or in another construction, artifacts of spectacle. Take the Kardashian family who, despite their apparent lack of clear-cut talent, at least in the traditional sense, monopolized the global attention economy through an interminable string of stunts.
The past few months have similarly found BurnaBoy unleashing spectacle after spectacle to saturate the media space with his presence, and the latest iteration of this trend appears to be his newly acquired McLaren Senna—one of the fifteen that were produced by the company. Reportedly purchased for some $2 million, the car has kept the chatter mill running. Netizens have debated the purported price of the car, jousted about whether it’s the most expensive in the country, and mulled over the ethics and wisdom of splurging on yet another luxury car in a country like Nigeria, where good roads are a rarity and citizens are steeped in poverty. His fans have similarly amplified the conversation, albeit by steering it in a different direction. The car, they argue, is a sign of his ascendancy, yet another trapping of his hegemony over his peers. After all, how can you claim to be above their patron saint if you don’t, at the very least, own the most expensive car in Nigeria?
One clip which has been swirling around social media, heralded by his fans, unspools with the narrative structure of a movie. “They say it has to be A.I,” Burna Boy intones in the opening sequence, railing against skeptics who were incredulous at the news. What then follows is an accretion of brisk shots that tell the story of the car’s journey to the artist’s Lagos residence. Watching this clip it’s hard not to see parallels to the influencer-produced vlogs and “storytimes” that are pervasive on platforms like TikTok.
Asake is another artist who has leaned into spectacle in recent times. He has, for some time now, been teasing a new era and an imminent album entitled Money. Instead of traditional promotional expedients, his approach has involved goading fans into speculating about possible relationships between him and supermodels. In the video for Why Love, we see Asake, gussied up in a dust brown bomber jacket, a red shirt, and cargo pants, moseying around a room with the Instagram model and influencer India Love. In the weeks following the video’s release, pictures of the pair in poses that suggest a romantic relationship surfaced on social media, stirring rumors, if debates, about a relationship between them.
A similar incident played out between the artist and London-based model and media personality Eva Apio, who were spotted together, on multiple occasions, during the March edition of Paris Fashion Week, donning matching outfits. Skeptics might contend that he at no point directly announced a relationship with these models. This, however, completely misses the point. Suggestion is a powerful tool for generating conversation or engineering spectacle because it leaves room for interpretation, for debate, it allows people to consider a situation and arrive at their conclusions.
On the other end of the marketing spectrum, a crop of upstarts have been leveraging platforms like TikTok and Twitch in innovative ways. The appeal of these platforms, to these nascent acts, seems to me to be their comparative cost-effectiveness. The list of upcoming acts leveraging these platforms creatively is extensive, comprising acts like Txmmyily, Jemiyo, Luwa.Mp4, Brazy, and Zaylevelten, to name a few. Mavo and Wavestar particularly stand out on account of their song Escaladizzy, which has become something of a viral sensation. Roughly two weeks into its release, the song has crossed the 1 million mark on Spotify and sits at 23 on Apple Music’s Top 100 Nigeria charts—impressive numbers when you consider that these are unsigned undergraduates who stoked anticipation for the song by relentlessly pushing it on TikTok.
If fanning the embers of spectacle and galvanizing support on platforms like TikTok and Twitch, represent the frontiers of music marketing today, then Davido, who recently released an album, is straddling both old and new, traditional and bleeding edge, seemingly hedging his bet on all fronts. He has performed traditional media runs, appearing on podcasts, interviews, magazine covers, and the like. But he has also appeared on Twitch streams—with Peller and Cruel Santino—and leaned assiduously into TikTok as a promotional expedient. Spectacle has also factored into his approach. About a week ago he flaunted his newly-acquired chain which features a giant “5” as its pendant. Fans of the artist have championed it as the “biggest chain in Africa,” and while that claim is unsubstantiated, it goes to show just how large the thing is.
It remains to be determined which strategies will endure long term but Davido’s approach—rolling all of them into a single approach—has proved effective. So much so that even casual listeners who have been relentlessly exposed to his numerous promotional stratagems have hailed his marketing savvy, in some cases offering it up as an example to other artists. The idea that traditional media is a vestige of an obsolete era is increasingly gaining purchase among many. About a week ago the argument that music videos no longer serve any purpose stirred a fiery conversation on social media. Of course this is ridiculous, music videos directly open a path to television marketing and help burnish the artist’s brand image. The fact that this was a topic of debate shows that a lot of people have missed the mark entirely, which is that while traditional models have ceded some grounds in recent years, they are very much still relevant and the future of the market is unlikely to be split into old and new, what will most likely happen is a blend of traditional and cutting edge. And if Davido’s promotional run for his album tells us anything, it’s that this is a winning formula.
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