afrobeats

When Davido released his fourth studio album, Timeless, on March 31, it marked a career peak for the Afrobeats star in the United States: At No. 37, it was his highest-charting album on the Billboard 200. It also debuted at No. 2 on the World Albums chart and placed five songs in the top 20 of the Billboard U.S. Afrobeats chart for a career total of 25 — vaulting him above Wizkid into third place among artists with the most entries on the chart. As of Aug. 3, Timeless has racked up 134.3 million on-demand streams in the United States, already outstripping the total number accumulated by his last album, 2020’s A Better Time.

In Nigeria, where Davido grew up and made his name, Timeless‘ success was nothing short of monumental. The album debuted at No. 1 on the country’s TurnTable Charts with 50.4 million on-demand streams in Nigeria in its first week of release — more than the rest of the 49 albums that comprised TurnTable’s Official Top 50 Albums chart that week combined — and remained there for 10 straight weeks and in the top five for 17 weeks. It also set a record when eight of the album’s tracks debuted in the top 10 of TurnTable’s Official Nigeria Top 100 chart, including each of the top four slots. At the midyear mark, it was the biggest album in Nigeria in 2023 with 185.6 million streams despite being released at the end of March, while the rest of the top 10 albums of the year to date had been released prior to 2023.

The success of Timeless was not just a huge moment for Davido but a massive achievement for his Nigerian management company, The Plug. Founded in August 2016 by music executives Asa Asika and Bizzle Osikoya (with live events and branding executive Tobi Mohammed coming on as a third partner in 2022), The Plug started out with the goal of managing producers, DJs and songwriters and has since grown into a full-fledged music company that incorporates management, distribution, publishing, live events, booking and a branding agency (it also represents some of the biggest Nigerian athletes on the planet). The company’s management roster extends beyond Davido (who, as of June 2022, The Plug co-manages outside Africa with LVRN) to include artists like Ckay (whose “Love Nwantiti” was the first-ever No. 1 on the Billboard Afrobeats Chart upon its launch in March 2022), Victony, Bella Shmurda, King Promise, Focalistic, Boj and the super-producer Sarz. The Plug’s live events division created and produces the largest music event in Nigeria, the Mainland Block Party, while its branding division — under Mohammed’s TopBoy moniker — regularly executes campaigns for the likes of Diageo, Pernod Ricard, Pepsi, MTV and more.

“Our goal is to be the biggest independent management and distribution company from Africa,” says Osikoya. “We need to get to a level where we’re not just only working with the people in music and sports alone, but people in fashion, in film. And that means us scaling to the next level of, when anybody is looking to come to Africa or partner with anyone in Africa, The Plug is the only one they think about.”

The story of The Plug begins, in part, with Davido. The Atlanta-born, Lagos, Nigeria-raised Afrobeats superstar began his career in the early 2010s with Asika as his manager, before the two parted ways for several years as Asika focused on his StarGaze Entertainment company. At the same time, Osokoya had his own company, B Entertainment, and was also working with the esteemed Nigerian record label Mavin Records, founded by legendary Nigerian entrepreneur and artist Don Jazzy. When Asika and Osokoya happened to meet up in New York, the idea came to return to Nigeria and join forces as The Plug.

Asika and Osikoyo initially set out to help those producers, songwriters and DJs who largely worked behind the scenes and began to build the company slowly, starting with DJ Obi. But by November, Davido came around asking to work with Asika again — “and the rest was history,” as Osikoyo puts it.

But at that point, that history still had to be created — and Davido and The Plug immediately embarked on one of the most successful single years for an Afrobeats artist at the time. That came off the back of four huge singles, including “If” — named Song of the Year at the 2018 Headies Awards, Nigeria’s biggest music awards show — and “Fall,” which became the first Nigerian song to reach 100 million views on YouTube. Davido would go on to win Best African Act at Britain’s 2017 MOBO Awards, Best African Act at the 2017 MTV EMAs and Best African Act at the 2018 BET Awards.

“We came up with this whole campaign that everyone called Back To Basics, where we approached his career like he was starting out fresh, like a brand new artist,” Asika says. “Everyone always references 2017 as a benchmark; it was probably the biggest year an artist has had on the African continent, ever.”

Around the same time, Mohammed, through his agency TopBoy, was formulating the idea for the Mainland Block Party, which he conceived as a monthly festival for those who lived on the mainland in Lagos. (Lagos, the partners explain, is divided into the mainland and the island, with the latter more of a cultural and event hub and the former more akin to the outer boroughs of New York City.) “When I moved back to Nigeria, I realized there was a social gap between the mainland and the Island,” Mohammed says. “But loads of cool people lived there. So I was like, we should start something here and we’re going to try to make sure it’s cool.”

The first edition of the Mainland Block Party occurred in April 2018, at a burger spot called, fittingly, Burg. (Mohammed calls it “the coolest burger restaurant on the mainland.”) The first edition drew 150 people; the second, 300 people including Osikoya, who began to promote it on social media and brought it to Asika’s attention. Largely through word of mouth, it soon grew to 800 people — at which point Burg kicked the festival out — then to 4,000 and, by December 2018, 8,500 attendees, who came out to see largely rising local Afrobeats artists — “no serious headliner, just vibes,” as Mohammed puts it. At that point, he, Asika and Osikoya decided to expand the festival’s footprint, and today there are Block Party festivals in seven cities in Nigeria and Ghana — including both mainland and island editions in Lagos — with the flagship event held every December. It’s since become the biggest festival in Nigeria by annual footfall, and last December it hosted 20,000 people with Ghanaian star Black Sherif headlining.

Black Sherif performs at Mainland Block Party in Lagos in 2022.

Courtesy of The Plug

“I’m not going to lie and say I envisioned this growth; everybody who starts something great would hope that it becomes something great, but you can never tell how deep it goes,” Mohammed says. “We’ve gone from Mainland Block Party to creating a global festival now that we’re calling The World Is a Block, which is speaking to the fact that one of the messages of the Mainland Block Party is also the inclusiveness of it. A place where you don’t need to go to the club and get a bottle, you can have 10 dollars and come dance and have fun.”

In 2022, The Plug and TopBoy officially merged, bringing the Block Party and TopBoy’s agency under The Plug, and officially making Mohammed The Plug’s third partner. In the interim, The Plug has been focused on growth and expansion, building out its artist management roster while adding several new verticals to its offerings, including publishing; distribution, under head of music David Edogame; and sports, under head of Plug Sports Lanre Vigo. (The partners make a point to note that The Plug is not a label and doesn’t represent its artists in more than one area; a management client does not go through the company’s distribution network, for example.) It distributes artists such as Zlatan, Fave and Qing Madi, as well as the catalogs of Davido and Mayorkun prior to their respective deals with Sony. This December, the partners expect some 24,000 people at the Block Party in Lagos before expanding to the United States and the United Kingdom.

Notably, The Plug is indispensable to the inner workings of the Nigerian music industry, which operates differently than the music business in the rest of the world due to the particular intricacies of the market, which include its lack of structure and local allegiances. (Artists like Burna Boy and Davido, who have global major label deals, handle their operations in Africa separately.)

“With the success we’ve been able to attain, we’ve been able to build relationships with people who have been in these positions, who we can ask about some of the opportunities that have come our way,” Asika says. “It’s been a lot of learning on the job, being our own biggest critics of ourselves, to the point where we have to sit down with ourselves sometimes and be honest, like, ‘Are we doing this wrong? Are we wasting our time?’”

Now, the goal is further expansion — not necessarily in services, but in reach. Osikoya specifically mentions opening offices across the African continent as a goal within the next three years, while the growth of Afrobeats generally around the world has meant that new partnerships, like the one with LVRN for Davido, are possibly on the horizon, as well as new initiatives for their artists across the board.

And several of their current artists have landed big hits of late — Victony has risen to the biggest heights of his career in the past year on the strength of his massive single “Soweto,” while King Promise’s “Terminator” reaches an all-time high on the Billboard U.S. Afrobeats Songs chart this week, and Ckay’s “Love Nwantiti” remains in the top 10 after 73 weeks. The possibilities are right in front of them now — and their influence is beginning to extend beyond what they can do for their clients into the next generation of the business itself.

“Now, we have more and more people whose parents have seen the success of people in the industry and are allowing their kids to be able to go to university to study things related to the music business,” Osikoya says. “Before, most parents just wanted you to be a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer. Now, people are coming back to Nigeria saying, ‘I studied the music business, I want to work at a label, I want to work at a distribution company, a marketing company, a PR firm.’ These things are helping develop the industry better.”