I am not saying artists should become some kind of moral police. Yes, Creativity must remain free and experimental. But freedom without reflection can slowly damage culture. When music constantly celebrates wealth without work, excess without restraint, fame without substance and pleasure without responsibility, eventually music stops reflecting society and starts to deform society.
FIRST, let me thank the School of Media and Communication at Pan-Atlantic University for inviting me to share this moment with you, even if virtually. I have always admired the important work the SMC is doing for our creative industry. Thank you to Dr. Ike Obiaya and his wonderful team.
The theme of this conference — “Sound, Story and Strategy: Reimagining Nigerian Music for the Next Decade” is very important and timely. We are living through an important moment in our cultural history. Nigerian music today has become one of Africa’s biggest cultural exports. Our artists are performing on the biggest stages in the world. They are winning Grammys. Afrobeats is shaping fashion, dance, language and youth culture globally. But in the middle of all this success, I think we must ask ourselves an important question: What exactly are we exporting to the world? Is it only entertainment? Or are we exporting identity? Because in Africa, Nigeria especially, music has never been just entertainment. Music is memory. Music is history. Music is spirituality. Music is culture. Music is how people explain themselves to the world.
Long before streaming platforms and social media, our communities used music as a living archive. The drum spoke. The flute told stories. Songs carried wisdom, warnings, grief, celebration and values. In all of Africa, rhythm was never ordinary. Rhythm was language. And Nigeria is especially blessed with extraordinary musical diversity. Every ethnic group developed its own sound traditions tied to its worldview and way of life. So when we talk about the future of Nigerian music, the conversation cannot only be about streaming numbers and global charts. It must also be about meaning. It must be about memory. And it must be about values.
And the one important question we must ask honestly is this:
What values are our songs promoting today? We know that music does not only entertain society. Music shapes society. Songs influence how young people think, speak, dress and dream. Across generations, our music carried wisdom, respect for elders, dignity of labour, courage, spirituality, love, accountability and resistance against injustice. Even protest music like Fela’s afrobeat had depth and philosophy.
But today we must ask: Are we sacrificing values for beats and clicks?
Are we replacing wisdom with virality?
In the race for streams, trends and fame, are we normalizing emptiness?
Now let me be clear. I am not saying artists should become some kind of moral police. Yes, Creativity must remain free and experimental. But freedom without reflection can slowly damage culture. When music constantly celebrates wealth without work, excess without restraint, fame without substance and pleasure without responsibility, eventually music stops reflecting society and starts to deform society.
So the question for Nigerian music is not only: “How globally successful can we become?” The deeper question is: “What kind of society are we building through our music?” Because every sound carries values. Every lyric carries ideas. Every beat teaches something. Future generations will inherit emotionally what we repeatedly celebrate musically. And this is why storytelling matters. The world is not only dancing to Afrobeats. The world is dancing to African confidence. African resilience. African joy. African spirituality. African survival. That emotional truth is what makes our music powerful. And if we disconnect music from meaning, we may become globally visible but culturally empty.
The second urgent issue I believe should occupy our attention at this important conference is the disappearance of our indigenous sounds and instruments. Today, when many young producers talk about music creation, the conversation turns quickly to software, plugins and digital tools. But Nigeria has one of the richest musical traditions in the world. Across our country, every ethnic community developed instruments and sound systems that carried deep cultural meaning. The talking drums, the bata, the udu, koras, flutes, gongs, rattles, chants and praise poetry traditions. These are not just instruments. They are cultural technologies. Each instrument came from a cultural environment, a spirituality and history. The late music maestro Elder Steve Rhodes who was a dear mentor of mine, understood this deeply. For years, I witnessed how he worked to document traditional instruments across Nigeria, drums, strings, flutes, gongs and indigenous orchestral systems. That work was not nostalgia. It was preservation.
Because when instruments disappear, entire systems of knowledge disappear with them. And one tragedy today is that many young music producers can perfectly imitate Western sounds but cannot identify the sound traditions of their own communities. We cannot build a confident musical future while disconnected from our own cultural musical memory. So one of the biggest opportunities before us is this: How do we bring indigenous instrumentation back into contemporary music?
Not as decoration. Not as exotic flavour. But as living intelligence.
Imagine our bata rhythms meeting electronic production. Imagine indigenous flutes inside modern harmonies. Imagine African tonal philosophy shaping contemporary orchestration. The future of our music cannot and must not depend on abandoning tradition for modernity, but on intelligently combining ancestry with innovation.
Cultural authenticity is becoming one of the world’s most valuable currencies.
And we have that authenticity in abundance.
This is also where scholarship and research institutions like the SMC become very important. Preservation is not only about recording songs. It is also about documenting knowledge systems. How are rhythms structured? How are instruments tuned? How are chants taught? How are dances encoded? These are serious intellectual traditions that deserve proper scholarship. One remarkable example is the work of Sir Peter Badejo, who has spent years developing ways to notate bata rhythms and indigenous dance systems so they can be studied structurally like classical music notation. Consider how significant that is. A few years ago, I produced a documentary on this to mark Sir Badejo’s 70th birthday. Converting oral rhythmic knowledge into documented systems is more than artistic preservation; it is the preservation of our civilization itself.
And this is why this kind of conference today matters so much.
We need ethnomusicology centres, indigenous sound archives, oral history projects, digital preservation labs and collaborations between music, technology and anthropology. We must treat African musical intelligence as serious knowledge not folklore. Because if we fail to document these traditions now, future generations may inherit only fragments of what once defined us.
Now let me touch briefly on technology and artificial intelligence.
Today, Africa is finally speaking for itself, through music, film, fashion, dance and digital storytelling. And the world is listening. But visibility alone is not enough. As Nigerian music becomes more global, we must ensure it does not become spiritually empty. And so the responsibility before musicians, scholars, technologists, policymakers and educators is enormous. We are not simply building an industry. We are shaping the emotional memory through which future generations will understand who we were
AI is already changing music production. Songs can now be generated faster. Voices cloned. Sounds automated. But there is one thing machines cannot truly replicate:
Human cultural memory. AI can imitate patterns. But it cannot inherit ancestry. It cannot reproduce the emotional truth embedded inside our rhythms. And this may become our greatest advantage in the future. The more artificial the world becomes, the more valuable authentic culture will become. So preserving African identity is not nostalgia. It is strategy.
Another important issue is ownership.
For too long, Africa has created enormous cultural value but captured too little economic value from it. That must change. The next decade of Nigerian music cannot only be about applause. It must be about systems. Artists must understand publishing. Creators must own their intellectual property. Royalty systems must improve. Archives must be protected. Because music today is economic infrastructure. Music is diplomacy. Music is national branding. Music is soft power. And Nigeria already possesses one of the most powerful cultural brands in the world. But soft power without structure eventually becomes exploitation.
Finally, I believe this generation stands at a historic crossroads.
Today, Africa is finally speaking for itself, through music, film, fashion, dance and digital storytelling. And the world is listening. But visibility alone is not enough. As Nigerian music becomes more global, we must ensure it does not become spiritually empty. And so the responsibility before musicians, scholars, technologists, policymakers and educators is enormous. We are not simply building an industry. We are shaping the emotional memory through which future generations will understand who we were.
The drum will always remember.
Thank you.
Femi Odugbemi, fta., fdgn.
www.linkedin.com/in/femi-odugbemi-4806b15
