As the global footprint of African pop culture expands, industry stakeholders are confronting a fundamental economic reality: raw musical talent and viral singles are no longer sufficient to sustain a modern creative enterprise in the algorithm era.
Speaking during an interview on The Beat 99.9 FM with Osi Dirisu, music entrepreneur and investor Oluwatosin Ajibade, widely known as Mr Eazi, dissected the evolving relationship between artistic creation and commercial entertainment, warning that passive consumer habits have fundamentally altered how music is marketed.
While contrasting conceptual bodies of work—such as his 2023 critically acclaimed project The Evil Genius—with the daily demands of short-form video platforms, Ajibade argued that creators aiming for mainstream commercial success must look beyond traditional studio production.
“Culture keeps changing, but as an artist, your goal is to make the music,” Ajibade explained. “Once you make the music, you have already created your art. But it’s beyond that now—it’s not just art. There is art, and there is entertainment. Now we are in the era of entertainment because entertainment has been democratised.”
The Algorithm And Consumer Utility
Addressing the shift in fan engagement, Ajibade pointed out that modern digital consumption often judges a song by its utility within user-generated content, such as TikTok dance challenges or lifestyle vlogs, rather than deep sonic appreciation.
While maintaining that purist art will always find its dedicated audience via algorithmic curation, he stressed that commercial pop music requires active multimedia engagement.
“If you as an artist just want to be an artist—you don’t want to entertain, you just want to do your art—there is still a place for that, and people will still find you,” he noted. “The algorithm will still send you to your people. But if you want the full suite of entertainment, then, my brother, talent is not enough.”
Pragmatic Capital: Welcoming Global Investment
This structural shift in content consumption mirrors broader financial challenges across the African creative economy, particularly concerning capital acquisition and infrastructure development.
Over the past decade, major investments into the African music ecosystem—ranging from venture-backed artist incubators to institutional equity acquisitions in labels like Mavin Global—have largely been driven by international venture capital and foreign media conglomerates.
Addressing debates surrounding foreign capital dependency, Ajibade adopted a pragmatic stance, rejecting ideological resistance to international investment.
“Money is money, bro. I’m ready to take anybody’s money,” Ajibade asserted. “If people from Mars, Jupiter, or Venus say they want to invest, Baba, we go collect the money. We take it from everywhere; we accept all types of money for proper business.”
A Challenge To Domestic High-Net-Worth Individuals
However, the entrepreneur emphasised that foreign interest should not absolve domestic financial institutions and high-net-worth individuals from investing in the continent’s creative architecture.
Historically, domestic private equity in Nigeria has heavily favoured traditional sectors like real estate, telecommunications, and energy, viewing entertainment and sports as high-risk novelties. Ajibade argued that early market-movers—including his own incubator models and subsequent external funding into Nigerian music companies—have provided a clear proof of concept that the creative sector is a high-yield asset class.
“There’s nothing wrong with money coming from outside, but I feel there is still a lot of work to be done in terms of putting money into our own entertainment structures,” he said. “Until Empawa came and put all that money into music, and people saw the results of those investments, other people couldn’t see the model. There are so many multi-millionaires and billionaires in Nigeria; hopefully now they can see that entertainment is not a joke—it is real business, and people can put money in it.”
