Contract-breaching is bad for music business, says Cutekinani

Media personality Esther Adekeye, popularly known as Cutekimani has stated that contract-breaching is not healthy for the music business.

In a recently-held interview where she made this known, Cutekimani said quite a number of artistes have seen their career drowned due to contract-breaching, adding that record labels have equally suffered the negative impact of it.

She, however, explained that contract-breaching is common in the Nigerian music industry because of greed and other things.

“Aside from greed and lack of exposure to the business side of music from artistes and record label owners in Nigeria, why we often see them breach contracts is basically because they didn’t define their relationship or wrongly define it,” she revealed.

The revered media personality, therefore, advised record owners and artistes to have their relationships well defined to avoid contract-breaching.

In her words: “Some record label owners in Nigeria see signing artistes to their imprints as helping them. Hence, they give their artistes the impression that they were running a charity organisation.

“Artistes should also understand that if they have record labels that were buying them cars, flying them on private jets, getting girls for them and all, they will be the ones to pay for these things at the end of the day. So, it’s a matter of understanding and being knowledgeable about the business.”

Cutekimani also encouraged artistes, record label owners, and other stakeholders in the Nigerian music industry to expose themselves to the business side of the art. There’s a lot of resources to learn from, even by going on IG lives, there are industry colleagues who take out time to educate. People like Steve Spotlight, Godwin Tom, NiyiGiggles, Adesope, Bankuli, Bizzle and more.

Her words: “Everyone in the music industry needs education, they all need to be taught. Music is a serious money business, and if you want to venture into it, you need a lot of education. It is sad that most of these artistes in their early stages, all they want to do is just to make fame, they don’t bother about their self-developments. And you need to know the business part of music and the law aspect. Your job is not just to come on stage to sing and perform.

“When you ask some artistes/Producers simplest of questions about Publishing, distribution, royalties even split sheets, they have zero idea but these same artistes want to wake up and become an Olamide overnight, forgetting how much time aolamide dedicated into gaining knowledge about the business of music. As an artiste, if you really want to be big in this music business, you will need to invest time to gain knowledge and exposure to the business and legal sides of your art. If not, at the end of the day, you will suffer and be easily shortchanged because you don’t have the right information.”

While charging record label owners to be sensitive to the growth of their artistes, Cutekimani noted that they equally need to have a legal framework that is considerably understood by involved parties.

Her words: “Record labels also need to be flexible and sensitive to the growth of the artiste. Sometimes, all you need to do as a record label is give the artiste an extra 10%, make the artiste a partner or even a slight tweak here and there as the artistes gets bigger. Every artiste- record label relationship should not end in bad blood.

“Executives should build a legal framework for their labels, so that everything is appropriately documented. They need to have in their team, legal luminaries that are very familiar with the music terrain.”