The first part of this article by Efe Omorogbe mirrors the process and perspective of a creative saddled with the self-imposed burden of pushing the envelope and delivering a world-class product.

Playing it safe may be prudent and profitable in the short term, but building the spectacular is an altogether different proposition—especially in environments lacking infrastructure and institutional support.

Great artistic or entertainment products require heavy investment of talent, time, effort, funds and ancillary know-how. To deliver the spectacle that is the multi-billion pound English Premier League, the smartest and most efficient people with a diverse and complementary range of expertise must converge to design, construct and nurture the systems around the basic idea that is the beautiful game of football.

This is the kind of structure and synergy that we need to build big and sustainable revenue streams around our music and culture.

I love Timi Dakolo. If he names his top-ten GOAT fans and I don’t make the list, I’d be heartbroken, but I won’t trash my autographed physical copies of his debut single and album – “Let It Shine” and “Beautiful Noise”. I love the music much too much, and it’s always twice the joy when there are physical copies you can touch. Grown folks can relate.

Yes, I was executive producer on that project, and Now Muzik provided management and label support along with Lone Records for both releases, but I’m first and foremost, a fan. Scratch that, I’m a superfan.

Timi Dakolo is world-class in many ramifications. The vocals, the songs, the branding are all on point and I would pay to watch Timi Dakolo give a one-hour acapella performance in a pair of blue jeans, a t-shirt and barefoot. I suspect the likes of Yemi Adamolekun, Love Idoko-Uloko, Kingsley James, Adebola Williams, Kelechi Amadi-Obi, Yibo Koko, Nwanne Okafor, Kate Henshaw, Alibaba, RMD, ATG, and a couple more superfans would gladly join in too.

For this, a cosy lounge and bare-essentials technicals would suffice, and I’m sure we would have a good time, but there’s a place for a Tiny Desk-style experience and another for a showstopping, jaw-dropping, brand-redefining spectacle. For the spectacle, it’s always down to the layers.

Performances are about layers.

Great performances are built on the brilliance with which myriad elements interact to deliver heightened sensory stimulation and deep emotional impact.

Monetisation is essentially about product quality and the establishment of the infrastructure and systems to efficiently standardise, market, sell and scale.

So, back to the hypothetical “Timi Dakolo : Live At the Wole Soyinka Centre” scenario. With the vocal ability, music catalogue and the branding boxes all checked, the next step would be to install other critical layers – a solid script woven around a powerful love story and brought to life through pristine sound, lighting design, multimedia backdrops and a deft use of props and special effects.

Weave on additional layers – a Cobhams Asuquo as music director and guest act, a 14-piece band, Loud Urban Choir-level collective for background vocals, a top-tier troupe for dance and choreography and a fantastic designer for wardrobe and styling support.

Bring all of the aforementioned pieces of excellence together under the majestic backdrop of the Wole Soyinka Centre for Culture and Creative Arts, and with top-level production personnel, allow cast and crew ample rehearsal time to perfect every note, chord, move, cue, transition and stunt.

What is created would easily be a 100-minute spectacle that rivals the best residency concert experience anywhere from Las Vegas to Dubai.

A product of such quality, live and exclusive, at the Wole Soyinka Centre can conveniently do 16 shows over an 8-week annual run, an attraction capable of drawing audiences from across Nigeria, Africa and the Diaspora. Well-marketed, a production like this can sell out all 16 dates months in advance. It has the potential to drive the sale of special packages to a defined target audience.

A city like Lagos could leverage such productions alongside its other attractions to position itself as a destination for weddings, anniversaries and milestone celebrations.

If this level of commercial value can be extracted from a somewhat niche asset like Timi Dakolo, picture what’s possible with Nigeria’s global mainstream superstars like Asake, Arya Starr, Tems, Rema, Davido, Wizkid and Burna Boy?

And that is where a project like the Lagos Arena, currently under construction, becomes an important piece of the jigsaw.

The magnificent 12,000-capacity facility will provide for the city that is already the cultural epicentre, the much-needed infrastructure to monetise its music and talents at scale hitherto unattainable.

The local circuit generated an estimated $395 million from concerts, festivals and tours across 2024-2025, according to the Basslines to Billions: Nigeria’s Music Market Intelligence Report. Facilities like the Wole Soyinka Centre for Culture and Creative Arts, and Lagos Arena, with the right content curation strategy, can galvanise exponential growth in the sector in line with global attendance trends.

Live Nation reported global revenue of $25.20 billion in 2025, an 8.8% increase over the previous year’s $23.16 billion. The key growth drivers are strong international stadium tours and sustained global arena and festival demand. While North America generated 70% of the total revenue ($17.64 billion), expanding international markets generated the remaining 30% ($7.56 billion).

Interestingly, Live Nation recorded a major milestone in 2025. For the first time in its history, international fan counts exceeded attendance in North America. This growth has been steady since 2021.

Now let’s go back to where this conversation started.

Why did Buckwyld ‘n’ Breathless happen? Collaboration. Why did it succeed? Collaboration.

Now Muzik/Buckwyld Media, Efe Omorogbe, 2face Idibia, Cecil Hammond and Flytime worked together to enable the initiative. Without that collaboration, no single unit of this collective would have dared to attempt it.

Edi Lawani, Mai Atafo, BHM, DNMT, Banky W, MI Abaga, the late Sound Sultan, DJ Jimmy Jatt, Gecko, all the performers, celebrity cameos, cast and crew members, sponsors, media partners and contributors too numerous to count, keyed into the dream and worked with us to make Buckwyld ‘n’ Breathless a resounding success.

Nine editions and counting, the success of BnB has been built on passion-fueled collaboration.

There will always be a place for passion in the equation, of course, but this is also the season for profit-fueled collaborations. Today’s collaboration should be with the best minds in finance, marketing, sales, technical, media and other related fields.
Passion alone built the industry. Profit-oriented collaboration is necessary to scale it.

We must commend the investors and executives who have mustered the courage to deploy the required funding to deliver a facility of the quality of the Wole Soyinka Centre for Culture and Creative Arts. It will be virtually impossible to grow the local monetisation of Naija pop culture without the infrastructure of the scale and quality of the National Theatre. The well-established touring infrastructure in the West is a key factor in why monetising Afrobeats has been far more efficient in the West than back home in Africa.

Pragmatic pricing of the facility for profitability is imperative, or else, deterioration will be the inevitable outcome. For optimum profitability, however, the business model must be strategically nuanced to allow key players in the ecosystem to develop and deliver content experiences that are capable of drawing to the facility a steady traffic of guests from within and outside Nigeria.

Strategic collaboration amongst creative, technical, media and marketing luminaries holds the key to profitability in these types of ventures. The right products and marketing machinery is necessary to attract the right audiences and unlock the revenue that rewards every stakeholder within the value chain.

A collaboration that enables us to deliver world-class productions showcasing a handful of the most in-demand and iconic Nigerian talents creates residency opportunities that keep the facility doors open for far more nights than one-off venue hire opportunities ever could.

There’s a reason why the Live Nation/Ticketmasters’ business model has delivered sustained profitability for the music industry and impressive culture-sector growth in nations like the US, UK, Canada and others.

They have been able to create a well-oiled ecosystem which thrives on the synergy amongst individual units handling key aspects of the business of touring and live experiences.

There’s the network of partner venues ranging from clubs, theatres and arenas to stadiums, from 100 to 80,000 capacity, catering to all categories of talents – emerging, fast-rising, established, red-hot and veterans. They have the booking, production, ticketing, marketing and promoter partnership play that identifies in-demand performers and puts them in front of paying fans essentially via a door-deal model that spreads responsibility and risk and maximises opportunity and revenue at scale.

There are reasons why the bulk of revenue generated by the culture doesn’t make it to Nigerian banks or the local economy. The Bankers’ Committee, I’m sure, has more reliable data on this than those of us in the creative industry do. There are smart ways to tip these scales and position the local economy to assess a larger share of the revenues generated by our music and culture.

These are the strategic conversations we ought to be having and the collaborative work we should be doing to develop a model that has the potential to deliver more value and profit to all stakeholders in the short, medium and long terms.

Nigeria’s music and culture have already conquered the world. The challenge before us now is not one of talent, but of systems.

Great cultures are not monetised by chance. They are monetised through infrastructure, collaboration and deliberate ecosystem design. The time is now. The critical stakeholders are primed.

Let’s get cracking. There are huge opportunities to unlock and big money to be made.

This article was written by Efe Omorogbe, Chief Executive Officer of Buckwyld Media Network. Views expressed in this article are strictly the writer’s and do not represent The Netng’s

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