10 years ago, it was not like this…

The major problem upcoming artists faced 10 years ago was an access to “technology”.

Recording and releasing music professionally was quite expensive 10 years ago as equipments were bulky, dedicated mixers could occupy a whole 9 celling room and you had to release via CD which was very capital intensive.

However fast forward to today and with just a laptop, a microphone and a DAW you are good to go. Making music professionally today has never been easier and so the number of “professional musicians” have risen exponentially over the last 10 years resulting in an over saturated musical market.

This very fact of oversaturation has subverted and changed the dynamics of the music industry and the entertainment business a lot and people on the outside don’t realize this. There are yet to understand the current state of affair and so for most artists today, the industry is an explorative journey into murky waters filled with trials and errors – a capital intensive, experimental and mentally exhaustive process.

10 years ago, music was still very much in the state of transition from analogy to digital and platforms that dominate today like Spotify, YouTube Music and Audiomack were at best just beginning or non existent.

This access to technology used to make up a large part of the capital put into the business while the marketing aspects were covered with existing label and personal structures and agreements with available radio stations, TV’s and Club DJ’s.

This model favoured the big labels that already had all the established connections and large accounts to fund new artist.

This meant that they alone decided who got to be heard and who didn’t; a situation nobody especially the artist themselves didn’t like. There was clamour for a new system to replace the old – a system that would give everyone a voice, an equal opportunity to be heard and listened to…

And as the transition from analogy to digital continued, our preferred methods for consuming music changed, so did the dynamics of the music industry and entertainment business.

CD Revenues and Digital Purchases which were at least several dollars a piece suddenly got replaced by 0.0003 cents per 45 sec stream.

Music could be recorded and released digitally overnight without quality equipments, mixing, mastering and professional oversight. There was musical democracy but as more artist got involved, so did the revenue of the over all market continue to drop and quality of sound suffer. Modern artist now favour short trendy sounds as opposed to long well composed and constructed bodies of work that dominated the industry 10 years ago meaning those who couldn’t fit into the new box were kept out of the mainstream.

This change also affected the marketing part of the music business. With the introduction and Popularity of Social Media Marketing, the old approach to music marketing was destroyed and a new and very Capital intensive model put in place that relied on heavy and coordinated social media spending.

One article is not enough to discuss the changing dynamics of the Nigerian music industry and entertainment business and so in this editorial series we will discuss and dissect and also see how the changes in access to technology changed the marketing side of the business and how artists can navigate the murky waters of the modern Nigerian music industry.

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