AI is Nigeria’s new music disruptor, but not its replacement

The year is 2014, and Nigerian singer-songwriter, Harrysong, is one of the biggest stars in Africa. After a couple of years in the underground, he reached the pinnacle of Afropop with his tribute song, “Mandela,” which gained continental fame through the syndication network of teleco services. Harrysong’s breakout was the crystallisation of the ringback tune era, when the penetration of mobile services was leveraged for music distribution and monetisation. At the height of the ringback tune era, Nigeria’s music industry generated over $100 million from the service, signalling an early adoption of technology within the industry before the streaming boom. 

Much like ringback tunes, Nigeria’s music ecosphere has often met technology with open arms, although in some instances reluctantly. Still, local adaptation follows global technological trends. Just as social media became a critical part of the music industry’s pipeline, there have been endeavours that failed to catch on at scale, like the advent of NFTs and other associated Web3 technologies. Today is no exception as artificial intelligence sits at the heart of conversations surrounding the present and future of music.

Nigerian singer, FAVE, recently saw her single from July 2025, “Intentions,” receive a new lease of life across social media due to a new version of the song published by AI studio, Urban Chords. The success of the AI version has taken her by surprise. Taking ownership of the moment, FAVE officially re-released the new version of “Intentions” in collaboration with Urban Chords, reflecting the changing attitudes towards AI.  

But what does this mean for the future of music and its human creators? 

AI for good

Creating music can be a complex process, and AI can help simplify it. Much like how a calculator can be an assistant when solving complex arithmetic, AI can be a tool used to make the music creation process efficient. A wholesome example of the use of AI is its adoption by American rapper Beanie Seagal, who announced that he’s going to make use of the technology to create music in his original voice after a near-fatal shooting in 2014 that caused him to lose his voice. The most popular use cases of AI today are the emergence of multiple non-human artists. In Nigeria alone, we have seen the emergence of Kumi Bora, “an emotionally intelligent AI artist making Afrobeats music,” as well as human record producers like Mykah and Eclipse Nkasi churning out AI-generated Afrobeats albums. However, with time, there will be more contextual adoption of the technology in a way that simply enables, without suggesting a threat to human creativity.

Appropriate labelling

Last month, Urban Chords released an AI compilation titled Choir Refix, exploiting the compositions of multiple popular songs. Choir Refix cracked the top 50 of TurnTable’s Nigerian Official Top 100 Albums chart, highlighting how better AI has gotten at mimicking human output. Still, it creates a choice problem. Music consumers should be able to decide if they want to support human creators or an AI creation. As such, music generated by AI studios should be labelled appropriately. This, of course, places a new layer of responsibility on all arms of the music industry, but especially on distribution services, which ultimately are the conduit between creators and the consuming public.

Proper licencing

At present, there’s no widely-known framework for how AI studios might compensate human artists whose likenesses are utilised to train their model. Would a viable solution be to treat it as a one-off licensing deal, or should artists whose likeness is used to train AI models be paid in gratuity every time a preset trained on their likeness is used to generate new music? Perhaps this should be approached like sampling, where a fragment of every new composition is due to the artist whose work contributed to the training of any preset in use. 

In my view, music experience cannot be relegated to recorded and digital consumption, which is where AI music currently thrives. Fans will always crave shared spaces and human connections like live performances.  A major talking point in recent weeks has been the steep price of Nigerian concert tickets. This signals that humans will continue to seek out a music presentation that transcends what AI music currently offers. 

AI will undeniably become a critical part of the music creation process, just like how the world uses the previously frowned-upon audio processing software, Auto-tune, today. It will be a mainstay in future creative processes, but won’t define artistic identities at scale. Generative AI artists and music might grow to become a strong niche, but will not become the standard in the totality of the music creation and consumption experience. 

_____

Victor Okpala is a Nigerian music and tech executive, propagating education and the advancement of music through various digital pillars, including in his current role at Spotify, where he works as the artist and label partnerships manager for West Africa.