As more and more people turn to streaming services like Boomplay, Apple Music, and Spotify to listen to their favourite artistes, the way musicians earn royalties has changed.
But this isn’t the case with most of the old-generation artistes like Eedris Abdulkareem, Olu Maintain, Rasqui, and Ruggedman, unlike younger acts like Wizkid, Burna Boy and Oxlade, who are earning a killing from streaming revenues., known as Ruggedman, whose music career began professionally in 1999 in this exclusive interview with PREMIUM TIMES, reveals why he never earned royalties throughout his 24-year-old music career.
: I have occasionally dropped a dance track and a rap track. That way, fans keep the fact that I am a rapper. But at the end of the day, things change. Times have changed in Music, and even in America, where the whole Hip-Hop music began, things have changed. So, if you want to continue making music, unless you have billions of Naira to promote your type of music. When things change, and you want to stick to your work, it becomes your music.
What you have now is called Lamba. What they call lamba is you just get famous street lingua, which means telling a lie. What this will cause is that it will reduce the number of evergreen songs that we produce in Nigeria. Because if you mention songs like 2face’s African Queen, today, or say my song, Bara Je, you will remember the lyrics. But the songs of today will be quickly forgotten in years to come.