Building On MAMAs 2014 Glory

Editorial

At the recent fourth edition of MTV Africa Music Awards, MAMAs, held in Durban, South Africa, big names in Nigeria’s music industry, Davido, Tiwa Savage, Clarence Peters and Flavour, won six individual awards to further consolidate Nigeria’s position as the leader on the continent’s music scene.

At the awards ceremony, Davido was adjudged the Artiste of the Year. He also picked the statuette as the Best Male act. His compatriot, Tiwa Savage, emerged MAMAs’ Best Female Act. Highly talented Nigerian music director, Clarence Peters, won the gong for Best Video with Burna Boy’s hit song, ‘Run My Race’. He was also honoured with the newly introduced ‘Transform Today Award’ By Absolut.

Contemporary Highlife singer, Flavour N’abania clinched the Best Live Act award to bring the total haul for Nigeria to six awards.

Observers see the 2014 MAMAs achievement as a big lift for Nigeria’s music and the need to build on the success. In recent years, Africa’s contemporary music scene has been led largely by Nigerian artistes who have been redefining the continent’s creative landscape. From Tuface Idibia to Tiwa Savage, Davido and WizKid, the brightest stars are daily emerging from Nigeria’s pop scene, and they are shining a positive light on the continent.

We believe that with a younger, digitally-connected generation that knows no boundaries and have enormous potentials, Nigerian music can be a game changer for the country in terms of revenue generation and bridging the unemployment gap.

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With CD sales not that encouraging, music sales via mobile phones are becoming the ‘in’ thing in Nigeria. Many now buy ring tones and dial tones of the favorite artistes from mobile networks and the artistes and telecom companies make money off this as a joint venture.

It also must be noted that gone are those days when our airwaves were dominated by music from America and Europe. On the local TV stations in Nigeria, more local artistes’ videos are now aired than ever before. This wasn’t the case a few years ago, but thanks to improved music production techniques and the quality of videos.

In spite of this success, we believe the industry players need to pay more attention to their craft. The days of mediocrity in the music industry should be a thing of the past, especially with improvement in the lyrical content of their music and sanity brought to their musical videos.

The craze for the use of half-naked girls and popping of expensive alcoholic drinks in the musical videos should be discouraged because these so-called creative works glorify obscenity and indecency which are distasteful to our culture and tradition.

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