I have just finished listening to a mix mash of Nigerian music and I feel numb, my brain feels numb, to be honest, I feel like my IQ has dropped to room temperature levels, no thanks to some "musicians" like "Terry G", "jaywon", “skuki” et al. How these guys have to guts to call themselves musicians baffles me. I am not posting this to bash these fellows but if the truth be told, these guys aren’t musicians because they love to do music, or that they have the passion for music, they are doing music for what they can get out of it (fame and money i.e. if they are lucky). After thinking about the “rubbish” a lot of Nigerian youths are producing in the name of music, my brain started to draw connecting lines between the Nigerian music industry and the web startup’s world.
1. In the good old days of the Internet, most web startups were useful, served a real need and made sense, e.g. startups like ebay, amazaon, google, yahoo are all prime examples, just like in the golden old days of Nigerian music, musicians like majek fashek, king sunny ade, fela anikulapo kuti, Ebenezer obey, to list a few, made good, sensible music, with their real voices (not autotune) backed with real musical instruments (unlike the synthesized music being massed produced in Nigeria). The reverse is the case today, where we see dumb startups, and a million and one clones of twitter (yarnable.com, yarnpad.com, .com, naijapulse.com) all laying claim to the ‘fame’ of being startup founder’s, like people like skuki, terry g, jaywon et al are all laying claim to being musicians.
2. “Its now a me too world”, just as everyone who can use the Internet is now spewing out a “webapp” and claiming to be a startup founder, the average jobless youth in Nigeria, who goes to clubs, and has a “voice” wants to become a musician. Why? Because it’s one of the cheapest and easiest ways to making money and fame (someone might insert “yahoo yahoo” here). Just because biz stone et al made a web app called Twitter and are now “rich”, then I can also create my own clone of twitter (yarnable, naijapulse, yarnpad) and make it “big” right? wrong!!!. What’s the compelling reason for me to stop using twitter and switch to your half baked clone? Same thing with music, just because 2face got into music and is now a multimillionaire, most youths now want to go into to music thinking the same thing will happen to them. What a pipe dream.
3. To the issue of pipe dreams, a lot of youths today are trying to purse a career in music when it’s even clear to a blind, deaf and mute person that these youths don’t have the talents, skills to make it in the music world. Since they don’t any other thing worthwhile to do, they drudge on with music, wasting there precious lives pursuing the fabled pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Same thing applies to startup founders, everyday we are bombarded with stories from techcrunch etc of startup founders hitting it big with multi million dollar buyouts making them instant millionaires and even billionaires in one swoop. This are rare and one in a million occurrences, which not everyone is destined for.