Documentation and copyright in music business: Implications for upcoming artistes in Nigeria

Abstract

The Nigerian music industry has recently gained national acceptance from her popular music as demonstrated and used in the movies, television and radio stations. Globally, Nigerian music artistes have been seen to collaborate with other music artistes from the Diaspora. However, with the advent of technological innovations in the industry, there are upshots of recurring issues and challenges in the music industry traceable to poor documentation. Ordinarily, modern technology should have served as a procedure for resolving such issues and thus, help in resolving similar concerns in the future. Among such issues are poor documentation on copyright protection for intellectual properties of music artistes and digital music piracy. Parties in the music industry tend to exploit this failure in documentation and archiving, which has caused inevitable losses to record companies. In an attempt by record labels to recoup their losses, they tend to exploit upcoming artistes into signing recording contracts that allow them to generate income from some of the artistes’ personal engagements such as live shows/performances, endorsement deals and so forth. This level of exploitation is due to failure of the industry professionals to update their documentation, and to address the problems arising from the technological boom in the industry. This failure has become a major concern in the Nigerian music industry. Thus, this paper adopts a combination of methods to gather data from secondary sources, interviews and personal observations to bring to fore these issues and make possible recommendations towards overcoming them.