How NMG is building model for African independent music

By : Daniel Anazia

Date: 3 January 2026 1:05am WAT

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In an era where algorithms dictate taste and virality is often mistaken for longevity, Nnamani Music Group (NMG) is quietly charting a different course for African independent music.    While much of the industry remains fixated on breakout singles, social media metrics and stadium-sized ambitions, the Lagos-based company has cut a distinct figure and it’s investing in something far less glamorous but far more enduring: infrastructure.    Established in 2023 by siblings, Johnel Nnamani and Nnamani Grace Odi, the firm has largely bypassed the industry’s fixation on talent scouting lotteries, focusing instead on the bureaucratic bedrock of the music business: rights administration, royalty collection, and cross-border distribution logistics.   The company was conceived as a response to a recurring problem within Africa’s music ecosystem. It emerged during a period of contraction for the continent’s independent sector — at a time when major global conglomerates were aggressively acquiring catalog rights across West Africa, while smaller entities struggled with the technical demands of a streaming-first economy.   Talented artistes were emerging at unprecedented rates, but many were trapped in systems that failed to protect their rights, accurately track their earnings or support cross-border growth. While viral moments came and went, sustainable careers remained elusive.    NMG’s entry into the market was predicated on a specific structural thesis: the primary barrier for African independent artistes was no longer visibility, but the ability to capture value from that visibility. Hence, the company’s operational philosophy represents a departure from the ‘360 deal’ model historically favoured by local labels.   Rather than position itself as a traditional label chasing the next hit, the group built its foundation around the often-overlooked mechanics of the business: rights administration, royalty collection, publishing management and distribution logistics. In doing so, the company has embraced an infrastructure-first philosophy — one that prioritises systems, transparency and long-term value over short-term hype.   Under traditional arrangements, record labels front capital in exchange for broad ownership of an artiste’s tour, merchandise, and recording revenue. In contrast, NMG adopted a service-based partnership model, creating a firewall between creative ownership and administrative management that allows artists to retain their master recordings while the company handles the metadata and accounting necessary to monetise them.   The firm addressed the liquidity traps that often stall independent careers, specifically the delay between streaming consumption and royalty payout. To mitigate the capital intensity of physical distribution, the company formerly leveraged a distribution with the digital aggregator ONErpm, securing a pipeline to global digital service providers without the overhead of physical supply chains.   However, this reliance on third-party infrastructure is a double-edged sword. While it lowers overhead, it binds NMG’s fate to the technical roadmap of its partner. Furthermore, the ‘democratization’ of distribution means NMG’s releases compete in a saturated market where over 100,000 songs are uploaded to DSPs daily.   This saturation has given rise to the scourge of ‘streaming farms’ illicit operations in Lagos and beyond that use bots to artificially inflate stream counts. As noted in recent reports by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), these farms distort the market, making organic growth look anemic by comparison.

A Different Approach From Typical Artiste-Focused Model Within NMG, the organisational structure takes a different approach from the typical artiste-focused model. While Johnel leads the creative direction and oversees public-facing A&R, the operations are managed by co-founder Grace Odi.   Her leadership has garnered interest from industry analysts. The Recording Academy highlighted her contributions in a larger discussion about female leadership in the African music landscape, recognising her vital role in implementing the NMG’s financial oversight and legal compliance measures.   This division of labour highlights a thoughtful corporate approach aimed at formalizing the usually casual connections within the Nigerian indie scene. By focusing on vital backend processes such as ISRC coding, split sheet verification, and publishing registration, the strategy seeks to minimize the frustrating ‘leakage’ of royalties that plagues many independent releases in the region.   From African markets to Europe and North America, NMG focuses on ensuring that music travels with its rights intact—a critical gap in an industry where many creators remain unaware of how or where their royalties are generated.   “Cross-border royalty leakage has long plagued African creatives, with earnings often lost due to poor data, mis-registration or the absence of local collection structures. The Nigerian market has long struggled with a lack of reliable data, where royalties from radio play and public performance often vanish into a fractured system of collective management,” Johnel stated.     “Our approach to addresses this head-on is a combination of administrative rigour with strategic partnerships to improve reporting accuracy and revenue recovery. The goal is simple but ambitious: make African independent music commercially viable beyond its home market,” he added.   According to him, NMG’s strategy attempts to bypass these local inefficiencies by registering catalogs directly with global collection agencies. This focus on backend operations, ensuring meta-data is accurate and rights are properly split, prioritises the accumulation of fractional revenue from global streams over the pursuit of immediate domestic hits.    It is a volume-based approach that requires significant patience, relying on the slow burn of catalog amortisation rather than the quick influx of cash typical of pop successes. Critics of this model note that while it offers artists greater control, it also transfers significant financial risk back onto the creators, who must often fund their own production and marketing in the absence of large label advances.   By late 2024, the music group began to look beyond the Nigerian domestic market to hedge against local economic volatility, a strategy that crystallized in October 2025 with the appointment of Trinisha Browne as the Head of Artistes and Repertoire.   Browne, a Trinidadian-Canadian industry figure based in Montreal, was brought on to oversee the company’s expansion into the North American and Caribbean markets. The move, according to Billboard Canada, was interpreted by analysts as an attempt to formalize the cultural exchange between West Africa and the Caribbean diaspora.   Rather than simply export Nigerian acts to Canada, Browne’s mandate includes integrating Caribbean talent into NMG’s distribution network, effectively creating a bilateral corridor for independent releases.   This expansion places the company in a direct, albeit asymmetrical, competition with larger distributors operating in the Toronto and Montreal hubs, challenging the firm to maintain its ‘indie-first’ ethos, while scaling operations across multiple time zones.

Beyond Cultural Optics Of Bridging The Atlantic NMG’s expansion is driven by a starker macroeconomic imperative: the ‘Naira squeeze.’ With Nigeria’s inflation rate remaining volatile throughout 2024 and 2025, the cost of music production, high-end mixing, mastering, and equipment, which are often indexed to the US dollar, has skyrocketed for local independents.   This development has created a liquidity trap where labels earning solely in Naira see their purchasing power evaporate before they can reinvest it. NMG’s strategic pivot to the North American and Caribbean markets functions, in effect, as a currency hedge. By aggressively courting listeners in Toronto, New York, and Port of Spain, the company generates a stream of USD and CAD royalties.   This foreign revenue effectively subsidizes the group’s domestic operations in Lagos, insulating its Nigerian roster from local devaluation and allowing them to maintain production standards that strictly local competitors can no longer afford.    In this light, appointing executives like Browne isn’t merely a showy attempt to expand globally; rather, it’s a strategic move to build a financial barrier that secures stable operations on the home front.   As global interest in African music continues to rise, the conversation is gradually shifting from visibility to viability. NMG’s infrastructure-first approach offers a compelling blueprint for what the next phase of the industry could look like—one where African creatives are not just globally heard, but structurally empowered.

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