The rate Nigerian music industry is growing, we can’t deny that streaming is a major contribution to the growth of our artistes. Afrobeats is now being celebrated worldwide thanks to the quality of artistes Nigerian music industry has been producing for decades.

We have moved past the era when we used to depend on blogs and alaba market to put out and promote music without getting any Return of Investment. Music is a very lucrative business, with the right structure  in place, both artistes and investors can earn a lot of money.

For an industry as big as Nigeria music industry, in a country with 200 million population, Nigerian artiste ought to be some of the most streamed artistes in the world, we ain’t leveraging our population.

Day by day, putting out music and promoting it  is becoming more expensive for Nigerian artistes, it makes no sense that all the money spent on making music and promoting it can only be recouped through shows and endorsement deals.

It’s high time we took streams seriously in this country, the amount of downloads that go into waste on blogs is way too much, in a country with approximately 200 million people, streams should be the least thing Nigerian artistes should worry about.

How can a song have 10 million downloads on a blog and 4 million streams on one streaming platform? I understand blogs are the closest to the street, an average Nigerian can easily access a blog to download a song, but honestly this thing needs to reduce.

Audiomack has already reduced music downloads from blogs by a significant percentage even though the platform doesn’t pay much, I believe with more subscribers, they will come up with better way of paying artistes.
even though the streaming platform doesn’t pay much.

However, we also have Nigerian made streaming platforms that are struggling to get subscribers despite the fact that these apps are free. So if you think the reason people don’t stream is because...

of the paid subscription, remember that we have streaming platforms that are free. Although aside paying for subscription on some streaming platforms, data is another factor that we should consider, it is very expensive and the consumption rate is also very high...

this makes it easy for people to choose to do a one off download on blog that will allow them to play a song for as long as they want instead of streaming on a streaming platform that would cost more data and will also be continuous. With ban on social gathering, artistes ought..

to be making money from virtual concerts but data subscriptions and consumption rate will make it hard for an average Nigerian to stream the concert. So if the cost of data subscription and consumption rate can be reduced, it will be easier for an average Nigerian to sacrifice...

...a token for their favorite artistes.
If Alaba market can be made irrelevant, blogs don’t have 2 heads, there can be a resolution for bloggers and artistes, nobody loses, everybody wins. After all blogs don’t even make money from downloads directly.

it only gives their blogs traffics which generates money for them through ads on the page. Artistes can try and reach agreement with bloggers to have a cut from the money generated through the traffic created by their songs for the placed ads on the page.

Some of the people that visit blogs don’t even visit the blog directly, they just type the title of the song and the artiste name on google, search and click on the blog that shows up first. However, I believe if Nigerian made streaming platforms can work on their Search Engine..

Optimization and Search Engine Marketing to make sure their platforms show up first when someone searches for a song or an artiste, this will reduce the number of people that visit blogs to listen to a song.

2020 was a rough year for Nigerian artistes, many artistes and record labels were pushed to put out projects that would generate revenue for their upkeeps, in a year struck with pandemic that forced the whole world to be on lockdown

it was a necessary solution.
You might say Nigerian artistes have millions of streams on youtube, spotify and apple music but little do you know that 70% of those streams are coming from UK, US, France etc.
Royalties are lifetime payments, artistes and record label will earn for

life without thinking of ever going broke. So many times we hear about record label and artiste disagreement, record label don’t want to let go of an artiste cos they’ve not recouped their investment on the artiste, because they depend only on shows and endorsement to get ROI.

Nigerian music industry is the biggest music industry in Africa, we shouldn’t be struggling to have a good structure and put things in place for our artistes.