Big Announcement Four months ago, I set out to document my thoughts and experiences on Artist Development into a result oriented guide for artists, executives and professionals in the music business. Today, I’m excited to announce that the book ARTIST DEVELOPMENT: MOVING FROM GOOD TO VALUABLE is officially out! This 370-page book is a structured compendium of relevant content that can help artists grow and become productivity; guided by creativity, timeless principles, and proven management concepts. But beyond the book, this is also the beginning of a bigger vision: the journey towards the establishment of the Imerge Creative Hub (ICH), Lagos. The ICH will be a community based environment and marketplace where emerging creatives in the music business can create affordably, collaborate and achieve their goals seamlessly. Proceeds from this book will go towards making that dream a reality. I’m calling on the creative community and every stakeholder in the music business to support this vision with goodwill and solidarity by way of purchase of this book. To God be the Glory. 👉 Get the eBook (₦10,000): selar.com/artistdevelopment-… 👉 Order the Hard Copy (₦15,800): tinyurl.com/artistdevelopmen…

An emerging Artiste should be able to push their music on #lagoslife. At least use your money on the site to get people to go listen to your music.🤷 The music business is a part of the Lagos life.

Finest emerging Rapper out here.

Here’s one female Artiste I’ve been following on TikTok, she’s @soundsofXylaa She is good.

A record label that does not have a defined culture, a clear set of values, and systems that guide how the label operates and develops its Artistes will struggle to take those Artistes to their maximum potential. Money alone cannot build a great record label. A strong label culture answers important questions such as: What does this label believe about music? What does it value in an Artiste? How does it develop talent? How does it make decisions? How are resources allocated? How are Artistes treated? How are conflicts resolved? What happens when an Artiste fails? What happens when an Artiste succeeds? What standards must everyone within the organization uphold? Without clear answers to these questions, the label often becomes dependent on individual personalities and moods. The executive wants one thing today. The manager wants another thing tomorrow. The Artiste has a different expectation. The marketing team operates based on whatever seems popular. Money gets spent without a clear framework for measuring its purpose. Eventually, the cracks begin to show. Mismanagement, misuse of resources, internal conflicts, unclear expectations, Artist-management disputes, and eventually, Artistes leaving the label with resentment on both sides. A record label should not merely be a company that signs Artistes and finances releases. It should be an institution with a culture, philosophy, system of values, development methodology, and way of working.

I love this song. It is my favorite from his latest project “PersWaysion”. From the production to the creativity, delivery, groove, subtle energy and replay value, the song is most definitely one of the best done by a Nigerian in 2026. Go stream the “PersWaysion” now.

What Does it Mean To Have a Community As An Emerging Artiste? As an emerging Artiste, your community should be a system and structure made up of people who don’t just like or want to support you, but who also have characteristics, interests, resources, networks, and behaviours that resemble the market you are trying to reach. A community goes beyond the group of people you have on WhatsApp who are interested in supporting you to a certain level with engagement, or dance with you when you are shooting content, who follow you to shows, or people who volunteer to act as your team. In the real sense of building a successful music career, your community should be a microcosm of the market you are trying to penetrate. Their reactions to your music, as well as their feedback and usage of your music can give you valuable information about what may happen when your music reaches the broader market. For example, if you are trying to gain presence among university students, your community should contain people who belong to that environment or have strong access and influence within it. If you are targeting a particular demographic, your community should contain people who understand the nature and characteristics of that demographic, participate in it, and can influence others within it. If you consistently create music that resonates with a community that genuinely resembles your ideal market, their response can provide useful evidence about the viability of your music, positioning, messaging, and your potential market fit. But there is another important dimension. Your community should not only resemble your market. It should also have the capacity to influence the market. The people in your community should ideally have relationships, networks, platforms, resources, or social influence that allow them to introduce what you are doing to other people with similar characteristics. That is the difference between having a crowd and having a community. A crowd can cheer for you, but your community should help you understand, enter, and move through a market. So don’t measure your community simply by the number of people in your WhatsApp group, or people dancing in your videos, or escorting you to shows. Ask yourself: Do these people look like the market I want to serve? Do they behave like that market? Do they have access to that market? Can they influence people within that market? Do they have the resources or purchasing power to participate in the value I am creating? If the answer is yes, then you are not simply building a fan group but building a market laboratory, a distribution network, and an early ecosystem around your music. Your community doesn’t have to be large. It has to be relevant. Because the goal isn’t to have the most people around you, but to have the right people whose behaviour can teach you about the market, whose participation can validate what you are creating, and whose networks can help you amplify it beyond the community itself.

Let the Artiste Fuck Up, and Find out: No matter how much you love an artist or genuinely care about their success, it is not wise to force your perspective on them. You can advise, share your perspective, help them examine the pros and cons of a decision. But ultimately, you have to allow them to exercise their free will and make their own decision, especially when you are not the one who will bear the consequences of that decision. This is one of the most important responsibilities of a music executive, creative, or manager working with an artist: provide counsel, not control. When you push your values, ideas, and opinions too aggressively, the Artiste may eventually begin to resent you or see you as an obstacle to their creative freedom. Your job is to help them see what they may not be seeing, provide context, experience, data, and perspective. But the final decision should often remain theirs. Even God, who created us, allows us the freedom to make choices. So love, care and protect their interests, but don’t force your counsel on them. And if you are genuinely convinced that your idea is right, sometimes you have to allow the Artiste to make the mistake. Because there are lessons Artistes will learn from failure that they may never learn from your advice.

It is interesting that an Artiste can spend 30 minutes reading gossips, long arguments, relationship gist, football debates, celebrity controversies and all kinds of things that interest them but will consider a five minute post about their career development “too long.” So the problem is not necessarily the length, it is about priority and for the fact that the knowledge is coming free of charge. For these Artistes, it is okay to consume long content about other things, but when it comes to information that could potentially improve their career, they want it reduced. Of course, people have different preferences. If you prefer short form content, there is nothing wrong with that. There are plenty of professionals who communicate that way. But if you genuinely want to understand the music business, develop yourself as an Artiste, understand your audience, build a brand and make better decisions, you must sometimes be willing to sit with information. Not everything valuable can be compressed into a short tweet. Some things require context, examples, and explanation that requires you to actually think. And that is what I am trying to provide. I am not creating content to win a competition for the shortest attention span. I am creating content for Artistes who are willing to learn. So if my posts are too long for you, that is completely fine. Scroll past them. But don’t confuse your unwillingness to spend time learning with the content being too long. People make time for what they consider valuable.

Importance of Having a Recognizable Identity as an Artiste. If this picture were posted on another platform by another Artiste, or another Artiste appeared with the same hair and frame, many people would immediately assume it was Swayvee or the Artiste copied his style. That’s what it means to own your brand as an Artiste. Many emerging Artistes underestimate the power of recognizability alongside making good music, because building a solid brand is hard work that takes investment, consistency and self awareness. It’s not enough to have good music. Good music has to be packaged or presented in a unique, creative and recognizable image that reflects your conviction, sound, style and value that can be etched in the mind of the consumer such that; when the person hears your music, they can picture you, and when they see you, they can feel the effect of your music-even when your music isn’t playing. Branding also goes beyond expensive clothes, jewellery and aesthetics so much so that even with no clothes on, you can tell thats Swayvee. Swayvee is a good example of how an Artiste can communicate identity simply through appearance and presentation-even at no cost. When people can recognize a particular appearance and sound, and connect it to you, you have created an eternal mark as an Artiste and built something valuable that will outlive you.

If I ever have the opportunity to meet @PeterObi or any presidential aspirant, one important question I’ll ask is: What are your plans for Nigeria’s music and entertainment industry? I believe the Nigerian music industry needs stronger and better-established record labels, capacity-building platforms that adequately train music professionals, and organised bodies capable of influencing positive change within the industry. But beyond these, the industry needs favourable government policies that create an enabling environment for productivity and provide clear channels for government and the private sector to participate in maximising the opportunities within the music business. The Nigerian music industry is practically detached from government policies and economic plans. For a sector that contributes significantly to the economy and provides livelihoods for millions of young people, it is unfortunate that successive governments have not done enough to develop policies specifically designed around the growth of music and entertainment. Tax policies, access to finance, government borrowing and spending, insecurity, police brutality and other national issues all affect the music business, yet their impact on the sector is rarely given adequate consideration. As creatives and stakeholders, we must think collectively, ask the right questions and use our influence to advocate for meaningful government participation in the development of our industry. We’ve come a long way. But there’s still a lot more we can do beyond Artistes and and “Afrobeats to the world”.

The power you have as an Artiste is not tied to your talent. It is tied to your value. Talent may get attention, but value is what gives you power. However, being valuable is not enough if you want to become influential and effective in the music business. There are two other things you need: authority and territory. Authority is the recognition and validation that other people confer on you because of the value and impact you have demonstrated. There are people in the music industry who need to acknowledge your value. Gatekeepers, influencers, executives, promoters, DJs, media platforms, brands, institutions, audiences and other important players can validate what you have built and, in doing so, confer authority on you. Your authority can come from the people who endorse you, the platforms that recognize you, the results you have produced, the awards you receive, the testimonials people give you, or the communities that begin to trust your voice. That authority becomes another form of power. Because you can be extremely valuable and still have limited influence if nobody recognizes your value or gives you access to the spaces where decisions are made. But there is another component that is often overlooked: Territory. You cannot influence the entire music market at once. You cannot be everywhere, speak to everyone, serve every demographic, dominate every platform and influence every part of the industry simultaneously. You need a territory. And that territory does not necessarily have to be geographical. Your territory could be a social media platform, like TikTok, X or YouTube. It could be a particular city, demographic, culture, genre, community, profession or segment of the music market. Find a space where your value can become visible, your authority can become recognized, and your influence can become measurable. Then build your strength there. As an emerging Artiste, you may not need to conquer the entire Nigerian music market from the start. You may need to become extremely relevant to a particular community first. If you are a rapper, perhaps your territory is a particular rap community. If you are a producer, perhaps your territory is a particular sound or a network of Artistes. If you are a content creator, perhaps your territory is a particular audience on one platform. The objective is to establish and dominate a territory before expansion. Because when you have a territory where people recognize your value, trust your authority and respond to your influence, you have something you can expand from. So think about your development as an Artiste in three stages: Talent, Value, Authority, territory. Talent is what you can do. Value is the usefulness of what you can do. Authority is the recognition and trust that others confer on that value. Territory is the specific space where you can exercise that authority and produce influence.

When you listen to the music of a lot of emerging Artistes, you hardly hear anything that sounds new, convincing, or deeply representative of the Artiste’s own conviction and worldview. From the lyrics to the production, they are basically regurgitating or reusing the words, expressions, production styles, melodies, samples and creative approaches of famous or established artists. But as an emerging Artiste, you have something very important on your side: Newness. You have the opportunity to introduce your worldview to the market. You have the opportunity to speak in your own language. You have the opportunity to create expressions, sounds, ideas and experiences that people have never encountered before. Look at many Artistes who are popular or gaining serious motion like EF moon, one of the things that distinguishes them is their ability to create a style of expression that is connected or original to them. They introduce new terms, expressions, ways of saying familiar things and distinctive production style. Eventually, you hear that expression and immediately associate it with the Artiste. That is part of what makes an artist recognizable. So, as an emerging artist, ask yourself: What is coming from me? What word can people hear and immediately associate with me? What expression am I introducing? What perspective am I bringing? What sound am I developing? What am I saying that other Artistes are not saying? What can people experience in my music that they cannot get from simply listening to somebody else? Because if everything about your music can be traced back to another Artiste, you may be demonstrating competence, but you are not necessarily demonstrating identity. Don’t just enter the music industry to participate in an existing culture. Find something within you that is worth adding to the culture.

People Helped You, Whom Have You Helped? One thing you will notice in the music business is that some Artistes can go on and on about the people who supported them, the people who showed them love, the people who believed in them and the people who helped them along the way. But when you look at the story of other emerging or established Artistes, you rarely hear anyone talk about how those Artistes helped them grow. If your story is constantly about the people who helped you, but as you rise, nobody is able to tell a story about how you helped them, that should make you examine more than your career. It should make you examine your attitude towards people. Success should not only change your position. It should increase your capacity to contribute to the success of others. You cannot spend your entire career talking about who opened doors for you while never opening a door for someone else. You cannot constantly celebrate the people who gave you opportunities and then become unwilling to create opportunities for others when you finally have the capacity to do so. He who is given much, much is expected. So, as you talk about the people who supported you, ask yourself another question: Who are you supporting? Who have you introduced? Who have you recommended? Whose talent have you helped people discover? Whose career have you helped move forward? Whose story can be told with your name in it? Because one of the clearest signs that you have grown is not simply that more people are talking about how they helped you. It is that more people can genuinely tell stories about how you helped them. Don’t just become an Artiste with a story of how others helped you become successful. Become part of somebody else’s success story. NB: This is not related or directed at anyone in the video. It is just addressing a phenomenon I’ve come to observe about some established Artistes, who no one has ever made a reference to them for their help or support.

The Three Elements Your Music Content Should Have as an Emerging Artiste: When you are pushing your music as an emerging Artiste, every piece of content you create should have a job to do and must answer these three important questions: 1. How should people use your music? This is referred to as the manual effect. Your content should serve as a manual for experiencing your music. Your content has to show the viewer how to use your music as product, by how you demonstrate the dance, show the emotion, create a situation around the song, highlight a story, display creativity, energy, the lifestyle or the particular experience that your music was created to deliver. Don’t just stand in front of the camera moving your hands, use a creative means to show your audience how to experience the value of the music. Your content should communicate seamlessly how the viewer should apply your music to their life. 2. Why should people care? People have countless songs, Artistes and pieces of content competing for their attention. Your content therefore needs to communicate why someone should stop, listen, engage, follow, share, discuss or amplify. What benefit does your music or your brand provide? Maybe it makes them dance, expresses something they feel, gives them a soundtrack for a particular experience, entertains them or gives them something worth sharing with their friends or improves their status. Your responsibility is to deliberately construct the content so that the audience can recognize a reason to care. 3. Where do you want their attention to go? Attention without direction can easily become wasted attention. After someone discovers your music and understands why they should care, what do you want them to do next? Do you want them to stream the song? Follow you? Use the sound? Share the content? Come to your show? Join your community? Become a genuine fan? Help amplify what you are building so that promoters, investors, labels or other industry stakeholders can discover you? Your content should give attention somewhere to go. That is your call to action. The HOW demonstrates the use of the product. The WHY establishes the value of the product. The WHERE directs the attention generated by the content toward your intended outcome. This is why simply standing in front of a camera, moving your hands from left to right and saying, isn’t necessarily an effective content strategy. Movement is not the same thing as communication. A piece of content should communicate an experience, establish a reason to care and provide a direction for the attention it generates. When an Artiste understands these three elements, content creation for music stops being merely about posting and starts becoming a tool for product education, audience development or influence, and market penetration.