From Ibadan to Lagos: My Journey as a Nigerian Independent Artist

My journey as an independent musician did not begin on a stage in Lagos. It began in Ibadan — a city with deep roots, a slower rhythm than Lagos, and a culture that quietly insists you be honest about who you are. Long before I had a distribution account or a streaming dashboard, I had a notebook and a stubborn conviction that the things happening in my life were worth writing down.

The Ibadan years: learning the craft before the career

Ibadan taught me patience. There was no shortcut available to me, no industry machine sitting nearby waiting to pick up a promising voice. What there was instead was time — time to write badly, then less badly, then eventually to write something that sounded like me rather than like whoever I had been listening to that month.

I spent those years on the fundamentals. Learning how a melody carries a lyric. Learning that a song about everything is a song about nothing, and that the specific detail is what makes a listener feel seen. Learning to perform in rooms where nobody had come specifically to hear me, which is the fastest way to find out whether a song actually works.

Most of what I wrote in that period will never be released, and that is exactly as it should be. Those songs were tuition. They were the cost of learning to say something true in three and a half minutes.

Moving to Lagos: from writing songs to building a career

Lagos operates at a completely different tempo. It is the commercial and creative centre of Nigerian music, and moving there changes what is possible almost immediately — not because talent is concentrated there, but because infrastructure is. Producers, engineers, session players, videographers, other artists who are three steps ahead of you and willing to tell you what they learned.

Lagos is also where I had to accept an uncomfortable truth: being a good songwriter and having a music career are two different projects. Nobody was going to organise the second one for me. As an independent artist I had to learn distribution, metadata, release planning, cover art, pitching, and audience building — all of it in addition to the actual music.

That felt like a burden at first. It turned out to be the single most valuable thing that happened to my career.

Why independence stopped feeling like a limitation

People still ask whether I am waiting for a record deal. The honest answer is that independence has given me things a deal would have taken away.

• Control of the narrative. Every song I have released says what I actually wanted it to say.
• Control of the calendar. I release when a song is finished, not when a quarter needs filling.
• Ownership. The catalogue, the audience relationship, and the upside all remain mine.
• Speed of learning. When you handle every part of the process yourself, you learn the whole business in a fraction of the time.

The trade-off is real — independence means the marketing, the admin and the risk are also mine. But the barriers that used to make a label essential have largely collapsed. Streaming platforms do not check whether you are signed before they let a listener press play.

Building an audience across borders

The achievement I am proudest of is not a chart position. It is that more than 40,000 Spotify streams have come from real listeners across the United Kingdom and West Africa — two markets that are culturally connected but geographically distant, reached from a laptop rather than a marketing budget.

That happened through four deliberate releases rather than a scattershot approach:

• Thankful (2022) — the debut, establishing the voice and the posture of gratitude that runs through everything since.
• Without You (2023) — written for my wife when we got married, and still the most personal thing I have recorded.
• For Your Love Was Created (2024) — an exploration of faith and purpose.
• Good Life (2025) — resilience and joy, and the most confident production I have put out.

Spacing them out was intentional. Each release got room to find listeners before the next one arrived, and each one taught me something I applied to the following campaign.

What I would tell an artist still in Ibadan

If you are somewhere that does not feel like the centre of anything, I would say this: the centre matters less than it used to. What you need is a body of work that sounds like a person rather than a trend, and the discipline to keep releasing when nobody is watching yet.

Audiences are not built in a launch. They are built in the years when you keep showing up and the numbers are small enough to be discouraging. Every one of my 40,000 streams began as one person deciding to press play. That is the whole business, repeated.

The journey from Ibadan to Lagos to listeners in London was not a leap. It was a long series of ordinary decisions to keep going.