Kayode Adebayo, founder and CEO of CKROWD, on why music is only the first rung, who really owns the entertainment business, and how artists can turn influence into lasting assets.
Ask most people who runs the music industry and they will name a label, a superstar or a streaming platform. Kayode Adebayo gives a different answer, and he spent more than two hours on Friday, October 2, 2026, explaining why it matters for Africa’s creative economy.
Adebayo, founder and CEO of CKROWD, treats entertainment as one example of a broader pattern. The fundamentals that govern oil, telecoms and fast food also govern music, he argues, and artists who miss that lose money.
Start with the structure
Adebayo defines an industry as a human structure that combines factors of production (people, land, raw materials and finance) to create economic value. Every industry, he says, follows the same arc: ideation, production, distribution, marketing, sales, then revenue and growth.
The key variable is where a company sits on that chain. He uses telecoms to illustrate. Network operators such as MTN produce the core service and sit at the top, while banks that sell airtime on their platforms are retail agents lower down. Nigeria’s economy leans heavily on importing and retailing rather than manufacturing, he argues, so many local firms sit low on the chain by default.
Intellectual property is the sharpest version of this. Facebook owns WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook, he notes, so no local company can grow larger than the entity that holds the IP. The highest value in business, he says, lies in intellectual property rather than physical production. His example is Tesla. Elon Musk built cars partly as a way to gather data and develop self-driving technology, so competitors now pay to use it.
Who owns entertainment?
On music, Adebayo is direct. “The entertainment industry is owned by what we call the record companies. Not the record labels, the companies,” he says, because over many years they funded the creation of entertainment and, in doing so, came to own the IP. An entertainment company’s work, as he puts it, is to own intellectual properties it can monetise “for many, many, many years.”
That has consequences for artists. The artist, he says, “is not created to be able to own anything,” but the wise one uses the arrangement to build something that is theirs: a brand. Unless an artist has signed a 360 deal, which takes a cut of every revenue stream, a growing brand can support businesses outside the label relationship, such as touring companies.
He points to Asake. By Adebayo’s account, the music and the three albums were produced and funded through Olamide’s YBNL, which owns those recordings, and Asake’s brand grew in the process. When the contract expired, Asake moved on and now captures the full value of what grew around him. “It’s like an exchange,” Adebayo says. “I give you these products, you invest inside of me to market it to have value.” (Contract terms are Adebayo’s characterisation and have not been independently confirmed.)
Songs as real estate
His central metaphor is that a song works like a house. “Every song an artist sings is like you owning a property that is generating rent, and it’s going to generate that rent forever.” An artist who negotiates a share of that rent gets paid monthly, but “a lot of artists don’t do that.”
Streaming gives the metaphor force. When a major artist like Drake releases something new, Adebayo says, listeners return to the back catalogue and the old songs generate revenue again. That is why he says investors on Wall Street buy catalogues, which he calls “even more profitable than buying shares” in the streaming and licensing era. Justin Bieber’s and Michael Jackson’s catalogues, he says, earn money every day.
The key question, he says, is simple: “Do you own your record? Do you own your songs?” If not, an artist earns only a fraction of the value and may not be able to use the asset to transact. The distinction underneath is between the song and the recording. A recording’s rights, the master, belong to whoever funded it, and a catalogue you own can be pledged to a bank, sold to an investor or licensed on your terms, while one you don’t own cannot be moved at all. That is why Adebayo treats ownership as a business question before a creative one. Many people inside the industry, he says, don’t understand the business of entertainment, and “if you don’t understand anything, you keep losing money or you cannot optimize making money.” The wider industry has fought this out in public: Taylor Swift re-recorded her early albums after her original masters were sold without her consent, and large catalogue sales to the likes of Universal and Sony have been reported in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Those deals only happen when the seller owns what is being sold. His advice to artists follows: negotiate for ownership, or at least a share of the master revenue, because that income arrives monthly and can later serve as collateral.
The diversification playbook
Adebayo then describes how a savvy artist turns catalogue income into leverage. He gives a hypothetical built on Mr Eazi. An artist whose catalogue earns a steady monthly sum can take it to a bank as proof of cash flow and borrow to build a real estate development. The catalogue hedges the loan, and the artist ends up with royalties on one side of the books and property on the other. (This is Adebayo’s illustration of the mechanics, not a claim about Mr Eazi’s finances.)
His second example is Zlatan, who launched the Zanku fashion line. Using his brand equity, Adebayo explains, the artist produces garments cheaply in China and sells them at a steep markup, with fellow artists serving as walking advertising. The margin, he argues, is real. But Adebayo says he doesn’t “believe in the fashion aspect” in Nigeria, which he calls “not an IP market,” where licensing is weak and a celebrity brand tends to stall at two or three shops.
In a structured market, he says, the better route is licensing, and his example is Rihanna’s Fenty. By his account, Rihanna began with “two or three, four shops” and used her celebrity to sell the products. Demand outran supply: fans wanted Fenty and could not get it fast enough. The partner, which Adebayo names as Louis Vuitton, had a global distribution network she lacked, so it took over production and distribution while she supplied the brand. His arithmetic is that if a product sells at ten dollars, Rihanna might receive three and a half. That looks like a poor deal until it is multiplied by global volume. “Multiply it by the scale,” he says, “and you will understand why Rihanna is a billionaire.” Her smaller share of each sale bought her reach, and a smaller cut of a global business beats a full cut of a handful of shops. The lesson mirrors his Rockefeller and Chicken Republic examples: whoever controls distribution controls scale.
Kayode Adebayo’s account differs slightly from the public record. Fenty Beauty launched in September 2017 through Kendo, LVMH’s beauty incubator, and was widely reported to have generated around $100 million in its first weeks. Forbes added Rihanna to its billionaires list in 2021, attributing most of her wealth to her stake in Fenty Beauty, reported at roughly half. A Fenty fashion house with LVMH launched in 2019 and was paused in 2021, while her lingerie brand, Savage X Fenty, is a separate company. The structure was a partnership and equity deal rather than a simple licence, but it supports Adebayo’s central point about distribution.
The principle underneath is what he calls OPM, other people’s money. Do one thing well, deliver on it, and capital follows. He cites a Nigerian businessman who started out as a banker and became a major investor and chairman-designate of Seplat, the largest indigenous oil company in Nigeria. He also cites a refinery builder who no longer needs to raise money because Kenya and Botswana now call to partner on the same project.
Gatekeeping is a survival tactic
I asked about gatekeeping, a complaint I hear often from emerging creatives. Adebayo’s reading is structural, not moral. Gatekeeping, he says, comes from operating low on the value chain, where hoarding information protects a thin margin. Those at the top do the opposite, because they gain from wider networks.
Real estate illustrates it. A property owner or primary developer wants maximum exposure through many agents, while an individual agent guards listings to protect a commission. CKROWD, he says, is building infrastructure across concerts, tours, festivals, data, financing and insurance, so that it can collaborate broadly rather than gatekeep.
He also draws on history. John D. Rockefeller became the world’s richest man, Adebayo says, not simply by owning oil but by controlling logistics. By partnering with Vanderbilt, who controlled the rail lines, Rockefeller secured transport advantages that left competitors unable to move crude to ports, pushing them to sell cheaply and giving Standard Oil control of nearly 80 percent of US oil, by Adebayo’s account. His Nigerian parallel is Chicken Republic, which beat producers with better recipes by building distribution first. His advice to young founders is to study business history, because anticipating future trends yields massive economic advantages.
Conclusion: Ownership is the real empire
Adebayo’s argument comes back to one idea. Fame is not the asset. What matters is what an artist owns and where they sit on the value chain. The record companies built their empires on intellectual property they funded and kept, and the artists who have escaped the position of renting their talent are the ones who grew a brand beside the music, negotiated for a share of the master revenue, and used the resulting cash flow as leverage.
The stories he tells follow the same sequence. Asake delivered the albums, let the label invest in them, and left with a brand that was entirely his. The hypothetical Mr Eazi turns a catalogue into a bank loan and the loan into property. Zlatan converts brand equity into a product line, and Rihanna trades a larger share of a small business for a smaller share of a global one. Each begins with doing one thing well, and each uses other people’s money, networks or distribution to scale it.
For the people who work in and around the industry, the implications are practical. Artists should ask who owns the master before they ask what the advance is. Managers and lawyers should treat catalogue ownership and licensing terms as the centre of any deal rather than the fine print. Emerging creatives who feel shut out by gatekeepers should understand, on his reading, that hoarded information is usually a sign of a business with little room to spare, and that the people at the top of a chain have every reason to open doors.
It also changes how the industry should be read. A chart position or a sold-out show says little about whether an artist is building lasting value. The questions that matter are quieter ones: who holds the rights, who controls distribution, and what the artist can borrow against or license tomorrow. Adebayo’s own venture, an infrastructure spanning concerts, tours, festivals, data, financing and insurance, is a bet that the next generation of African entertainment businesses will be won in those layers, not on the stage.
Where Nigeria stands is a fair caveat. The licensing market is thin, and he is candid that some models that work abroad do not yet work at home. But the direction is clear enough. Understand how value moves through a chain, own the part you can, and let other people’s money carry it further than you could alone.
