Tunnel vision is one of social media’s many great sins. It’s easy, perhaps, too easy, to get stuck in a bubble, engorged by the algorithm, and believing your section of the internet to be the true place of worship. People clock in early in the day and doomscroll late at night on carefully curated pages that reinforce our biases. At our most centrist, timelines feature a fair measure of tailored content. At the extremes, they become digital identity cards, fitting representations of what we like and why we like those things, even before conversations begin.
What this means for the media we consume is that individuals with similar tastes eventually aggregate. Since interests are multifaceted, intersectionality creates social media experiences within community settings. There’s an undeniable measure of influence that arises from meeting similar minds—whether they be experts on said subject matter or otherwise. It’s this concept that enables promotion, marketing, advertising, journalism and other forms of media to compete for digital space, warring to influence consumption.
Releases in the music industry operate on these principles, especially in Nigeria. For Nigerian music, this takes the shape of New Music Friday drops, which is a ripple effect of a trend influenced by the surprise Friday release of American singer Beyoncé’s fifth album, Beyoncé, in December 2013, and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry’s (IFPI) subsequent decision to switch from Tuesdays to Fridays on June 11, 2025. Before and after records are released on Friday, many people and platforms work together to curate what listeners will hear.
Distribution platforms like Spotify create playlists, post them on social media, and tweak the shuffle algorithm in favour of certain artists and genres. Pop culture aggregator accounts, some of which also run blogs, post about music, create their own playlists, and churn out engaging content, sometimes directly from the artists, producers and their labels, who also promote the music with ‘pre-save’ links, giveaways, etc. Influencers create similar content on platforms like TikTok, operating as standalone brands. Legacy media outlets and print-based new media go the whole nine yards, combining social media posts, vertical content and their core publications (features, profiles, news stories, reviews, listicles, etc.).
Podcasters, who may or may not be journalists attached to a publication, produce commentary. Same with livestreamers. Platforms like Billboard and TurnTable Charts, which are independent aggregators of performance data, run publication sections and even release verticals on social media. Stan pages are laser-focused on their artists, and some are directly affiliated with the artists. Group chats exist for music discourse on Facebook, WhatsApp and Telegram. Pop-up ads inundate web pages and ad-enabled applications.
This ecosystem extends beyond the internet. For radio and TV listeners, on-air personalities are the gatekeepers. In areas where streaming is costly, illegal music websites come to the rescue, and the websites with the ‘latest songs’ folder define what others listen to. Barber shops, commercial vehicles, and other informal workplaces bridge the gap even further, having made contact through the previously mentioned conduits. The more ambitious rollouts take over digital and traditional billboards. Because so many roles and methods overlap, it’s hard to know exactly who should be responsible for each aspect of spreading the word.
In essence, everyone talks. The music gets to listeners in one way or another. And depending on your sphere of social media use and offline triangulation, encountering new music can sometimes involve one or all of these. The rise of Mara and its Cruise Beats predecessor owes more to the DJs, dancers, and keke riders of Lagos than it does to UK-based MOVE Records, which were the first to put their songs into project formats for streaming. Similarly, 3-step, Gqom, and Afro-house owe more to the proliferation of raves in Nigeria than they do to editorial coverage from culture journalists or collaborations between South African and Nigerian artists. Emerging acts in the gospel and alternative scenes enjoy momentary virality due to reposts by aggregator pages. But a new release by popular artists like Davido won’t be skewed in these directions. Instead, the grand scale of harmonisation ensures the music registers with all taste-makers almost simultaneously, impressions chalked up solely to quality, AKA ‘organic numbers.’
According to DataReportal, Nigeria represents a sizable potential listener base for any musician, with over 100 million internet users, including sizable communities on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Intelpoint reports a total of 7.57 million X (fka Twitter) users as of January 2025, which is 27% of Africa’s total X users. Even the most reserved, underground-loving artists crave recognition for their skills, and at the very least a groundswell of support whenever they put out music. Again, everyone talks. How well voices cut through the noise is one thing. What these voices are saying is another. With more and more label PR budgets eclipsing the cost of music production, the power shift is evidently aligned towards reaching as many people as possible. The attention economy has now become the final marketplace, and some might even call it the most important marketplace.
In a dystopia where utility is the be-all and end-all, we wouldn’t be so concerned about the ‘how.’ Unfortunately, the de facto conveyor belt of music releases today actually characterises utility this way. What does this then mean for people’s relationship with music and those who influence what they listen to?
As much as this writer accepts that competition is inevitable in music spaces, music influencers—in the specific sense of the role rather than outcomes—have escalated tensions between stan bases, bolstered by labels’ insistence that all publicity is good publicity. The ruse is visible to most people only when artist-affiliated influencers blatantly deride supposed competitors. But there are other, more subtle, ways stan influence permeates. For instance, while it’s expected that chart aggregators compile unique data sets, including rankings that specify gender and genre divides, one would observe that when this data is re-circulated, the questions posed in captions are designed to stir controversy.
On March 9, 2026, music page Album Talks reposted TurnTable Charts’ list of the 20 most-streamed male artists in Nigeria, ending the post with the question “Any surprises?” Expectedly, the comment section became a warzone of warring fandoms, some of which are so absurd as to be comical. An argument can be made for the purity of this question and how it’s merely the fault of stans who can’t engage it as they should. But that argument only stands in a vacuum in which the page’s influence doesn’t exist, innocent as the said question might be. If one can so clearly guide listening choices en masse, then exacerbating tensions is an outcome one must anticipate and manage.
Interrogating the forces influencing our sonic palette is essential to defining taste. It’s commonplace today to acknowledge Wande Coal’s Mushin 2 Mo’Hits (2008), Timaya’s True Story (2007), and Wizkid’s Superstar (2011) as foundational to modern Afro-pop. A legacy cemented on the battlefield of essays by writers like Motolani Alake. Similarly, discussions about Fuji, Apala, Juju, Highlife and other 20th-century genres in the 2020s have largely been helped along by the documentation of writers such as Jide Taiwo and Dami Ajayi. At the risk of ‘fanboy-ing’, there are many more instances of culture journalists shaping perception and understanding of music, and conferring judgment on overall quality. The audience is not mandated to agree. But the journo, doubling as a critic, is obligated to justify their opinions within the ambit of the profession.
In Nigeria, as elsewhere, this influence has slowly diminished. It’s not that there aren’t writers churning out compelling work. Unlike some other sections of the fourth estate, music journalism and culture journalism as a whole are blessed with a cross-generational balance of active writers. It’s that writers face a double dilemma of doubts about their integrity and a combative attention economy marketplace. As regards ‘integrity,’ a triad of artists who feel entitled to positive, sunshine-filled reviews and interviews, rumours of writers being paid to put out favourable material, and the operational agenda of some publications, has led audiences to approach everything from the routine reviews to in-depth commentary with caution.
To counter this, some writers have opted for hyper-visibility online and engaging these other equally active subsets of Music Twitter or TikTok with vertical content, short-form commentary, and the occasional correction. This works, for the most part, and is why these spaces haven’t succumbed to tomfoolery and ahistorical representations of facts in several instances. It’s also a pragmatic way to build an audience for these scholarly works. As the late great Nigerian critic and scholar Prof. Biodun Jeyifo once said, “Scholarship is a form of service, not self-promotion, and the critic who forgets this risks becoming complicit in the very structures of inequality he seeks to analyse.” So yes, talking to fellow enthusiasts outside of thousand-word essays is service to the people. It’s meeting the attention problem from a pragmatic, even pedestal, without further isolating culture custodians from the culture.
But there is a caveat. In attempting to be an authority on Nigerian music, journos can be complicit in ‘self-promoting’ without commensurate publicity for the work they do. Or the even more grievous offence of adopting the controversy-chasing shibboleth of banger boys to their infamy. When one is more willing to talk about being proximate to the industry rather than analysing it as an umpire, they render the playing field of criticism an avoidable formality. Fame becomes infamy, and trust is the first casualty. An uninformed audience is then less likely to parse the difference between an invitation to a listening party and stamps of approval on quality; silence in the face of repeatedly addressing the same shortcomings, and endorsement of impish tirades. Add this to Nigerians’ perennial struggle with art criticism, and you have a ‘hydrogen bomb vs coughing baby’ scenario with no victors.
On April 14, 2026, tech publication Wired ran a deep dive into the ‘manufactured’ fame of American indie rock group, Geese. Pulling at loose strings left by listeners questioning the group’s sudden rise revealed that the group’s virality was driven by a massive digital marketing campaign involving fabricated social media fans by the company Chaotic Good Projects. Backlash from fans, while immediate, was not substantial enough to harm the band’s reputation. But it’s the same ethos at play here that has also contributed to distrusting journalists: Many listeners feel apprehensive about the idea that they could be manipulated into liking music. To them, music is one of the few products that should be organic, both in discovery and enjoyment. Therefore, the idea that a corporation can engineer fans’ library additions, concert preferences, and potential participation in a community of like-minded people ultimately calls into question the audience’s autonomy.
It’s an idealistic naivete that ignores centuries of theory on marketing, advertising, and promotion. Situating this conversation in the post-streaming boom of Nigerian music, there are surplus examples of engineered listenership. Stream-farming isn’t intended to inflate artists’ egos alone. It’s to game the algorithm, ensuring high chart placements and playlisting, which translates to accessibility for listeners struggling with an overload of options. Spotify’s Top Songs – Nigeria playlist has over 107,000 saves. The Global equivalent has 1.795 million saves. As niche a genre as Drill is, there are over 20,000 users who have the official Naija Drill playlist saved. Alté Cruise has over 111,500 saves. Praise and Worship has over 306,000 saves, while Naija Worship has 112,600 saves.
Arguments that saves do not equal constant play would count if the numbers did not grow exponentially. People find new music with these playlists. They take playlist cover appearances as a measure of influence. If labels invest in getting their artists playlisted, talent and quality notwithstanding, what this means for the sonic palette of the average person who just wants to listen to music without a care for tastemaking is a median appreciation of the sounds. There aren’t any incentives to be suspicious about the influences responsible for their taste. So now, imagine what this looks like with less conspicuous aggressive promotional tactics.
On the surface, Nigeria appears years away from the US market’s guerrilla approach to getting the music out. To the knowledgeable, we’ve always been there, even before social media’s advent. The proliferation of talent shows earlier in the century, like MTN’s Project Fame, Etisalat and Pepsi’s Nigerian Idol, Star Quest, and Peak’s Talent Show, didn’t come about from an unending depth of goodwill. It’s an ecosystem after all. Multiple systems work together to bring the music to our doorstep.
Yet still, listeners are right to be concerned about who influences what they listen to. When tastemakers are mediocre connoisseurs and sommeliers, a negative reinforcement loop forms around the music. It’s not as much a mindspace to ‘out-woke’ (Alternative music fans will often defend bad music as misunderstood avant-garde masterpieces, sometimes with scholarly justifications to boot) as it is one where those with trained taste buds have to adapt for reach, switching formats and optimising for incontrovertible quality.
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