Every December, Lagos turns into one giant concert hall. Stadiums sell out, streets shut down for stage builds, and for a few weeks the city feels like the centre of the music world. Then January comes, the lights go off, and half the artists who just packed out The Palms or Eko Hotel are already booking flights for a festival slot in London, a showcase in Tokyo, a tour bus in Germany.
It’s a pattern anyone paying attention to African music has noticed: the bigger an artist gets at home, the faster they start looking abroad.
Ambition? Money? Or something the local industry simply cannot give them, no matter how loud the crowd gets?
To understand what’s really pulling artists toward international deals and overseas stages, I sat down with Pat, an independent artist manager, A&R, and music strategist who’s also dipped into event planning and organising along the way, about the kind of range that comes with going independent instead of sitting inside a label structure.
Most of his work has come from operating solo, though he’s collaborated with 49th Street on a couple of rollouts, managed Zaki Amujei for a stretch, and worked officially with artists, most notably Playtimi, a partnership that’s spent the last few years in quiet hibernation but is now stirring back to life behind the scenes.
More recently, Pat handled A&R, strategy, and creative direction for Bellz’s latest EP, “Back on Track.”
It’s this vantage point: close enough to see how deals, tours, and releases actually get built, but independent enough to speak freely about what’s broken, that makes his read on the industry worth listening to.
THE GAP MONEY CAN’T TALK ITS WAY OUT OF
Ask Pat what’s really driving artists to start talking about international deals and touring abroad, and he breaks it down into three things.
The first is simple ambition.
“Who doesn’t want to go global with what they’re doing?” he asks, and it’s hard to argue. No artist builds a career hoping to stay confined to one market forever.
The second is the gap, and here Pat is far less hopeful: he doubts it can be fixed locally, at least not anytime soon.
For him, it comes down to the strength of the economy, which determines the purchasing power of the people living within it, a contradiction anyone in Nigerian entertainment knows well: concerts sell out every December, yet the cost of running a show production, logistics, and security stays punishingly high the other eleven months.
It’s a reality he describes bluntly as a place where “whatever can go wrong would most likely go wrong.”
Compare that to a market where the systems mostly work, and the choice to leave starts to look less like ambition and more like common sense.
The third driver, Pat adds, is the financial aspect.
Between ambition, an economic gap that resists local fixes, and the pull of money, the push abroad stops looking like vanity. It starts looking like a decision most people in the same position would make.
WHAT ABROAD ACTUALLY OFFERS AND WHAT IT DOESN’T
Here’s where Pat gets specific, and where the conversation moves from vibes to infrastructure.
Can Nigeria match international pay?
“Debatable,” he says; it depends on the promoter, the market, and a dozen moving parts.
Production and security, though, are a different story: festivals abroad win, hands down, because the infrastructure abroad was built to support those things.
Sound engineers, lighting designers, stage architects; specialists who, elsewhere, are just a phone call away, have to be hunted down and paid a premium for here.
Circling back to pay, Pat is direct about what’s underneath it: earning in foreign currency is the goal of a lot of Nigerians, plain and simple, because of inflation.
Given the choice, who wouldn’t prefer it over naira?
Then there’s market reach.
Performing to an audience completely different from the one you’re used to, which Pat says gives you a different kind of thrill.
It’s exposure the domestic market, no matter how loyal, can’t offer.
THE MACHINERY NOBODY SEES
Ask most fans what touring involves, and they’ll picture a stage and a crowd.
Pat breaks it down into something more granular: an ecosystem assembled city by city, long before an artist steps on a plane.
It starts with transport, and there’s usually more than one vehicle involved.
One moves the artist and the core team between cities where they sleep, rest, and handle the basic business of being on the road.
Depending on scale, a second vehicle is often needed for haulage: sound systems, lighting rigs, instruments.
Then there’s the crew; no artist tours alone.
At the centre is the tour manager, running the schedule and budget, stepping in the moment something goes wrong.
Alongside them sits the production manager, handling stage setup, venue logistics, and compliance.
Below that layer are the technicians and engineers on sound, lighting, and video — work that’s invisible when done well and disastrous when it isn’t.
Pat adds a caveat most outsiders miss: these roles aren’t always separate people.
Depending on budget or a crew member’s range, one person can cover more than one function.
Underneath it all sits venues locked in by the tour manager months before the first show.
It’s a sobering breakdown, because it makes obvious why touring abroad often looks smoother than touring at home.
It isn’t that African crews don’t know how to build this machinery, the issue is that the ecosystem supporting it: reliable venues, predictable logistics, accessible specialists, simply isn’t as developed here yet.
IT’S NOT ONLY ABOUT THE MONEY
If there’s one myth Pat is eager to dismantle, it’s that artists chase international stages purely for a bigger paycheck.
Sometimes the math doesn’t even work in their favour at first.
He recalls Burna Boy’s team once talking about not breaking even on their first international show and yet, by Pat’s account, the benefits of that move were only reaped years later.
Part of what makes touring different from streaming, Pat says, is scarcity: an audience that doesn’t get to see an artist often tends to value them more.
Touring is about performance, and performance does something a stream can’t.
Speaking as a fan himself, Pat describes how watching favourite artists live has made him fall in love with their music again, which is why streams often spike after a show.
Money, though, is still a great motivator in its own right.
Security matters too, though Pat is careful not to overstate it.
Nigeria hasn’t seen artists mobbed or endangered at home.
He’s less certain how often security and guaranteed pay actually tip a decision; without hard data, he won’t pretend to know.
What he does know is that plenty of artists go abroad not for money or safety, but simply to plant a flag to say “I exist here too”, and trust the long game to pay them back.
THE MINDSET PROBLEM NOBODY WANTS TO NAME
Pushed to name a single fix that could slow this pattern, Pat’s answer comes without hesitation: infrastructure.
Logistics, parking spaces, venues, even access to the right technicians are all a mess, and that’s exactly what makes organising an event in Nigeria so expensive in the first place.
Even during festive periods (December and Easter), when the lineups are stacked and shows sell out one after another, the economics still don’t hold up: plenty of those shows barely break even, especially without major sponsors carrying the cost.
If producing a show at home got cheaper, Pat argues, if promoters didn’t have to build the infrastructure from scratch every single time, that alone could slow the pattern down.
It’s not a complete fix, he’s careful to add; there’s still a lot to fix.
But it’s a good starting point.
Infrastructure, though, is only half of it.
The other half is harder to legislate: how Africans value their own audiences.
“We find pride in foreign validation more than we do our own,” he says, a mindset issue that needs to change for everyone, artists and fans alike.
It’s great hearing people sing your songs in Tokyo, the UK, Italy, Australia, the US, or India, Pat says, but it’s atrocious to do a “world tour” and forget the people back home.
He’s heard artists go so far as to say their local streams and support have no value, a claim he calls straight-up nonsensical.
Correcting the trend, in his view, takes all of it at once: a different mindset, a stronger economy, better infrastructure, and a genuine appreciation for the people who supported an artist first.
Left unaddressed, Pat doesn’t think this trend plateaus; he thinks it gets worse.
Asked whether the local industry will correct itself with time, he doesn’t hedge: it might get even worse, not better, if nothing is done.
Maturity alone won’t fix it; it’s a mindset that needs deliberate work to unlearn.
Pat’s frustration here is pointed but not bitter.
Touring abroad isn’t the problem; every industry that wants to grow eventually sells itself beyond its own borders.
The problem is when it starts to look like abandoning home, dismissing the streams and support that built an artist in the first place.
GROWING UP WON’T FIX THIS ON ITS OWN
What Pat is calling for isn’t a boycott of international stages.
It’s a shift in what “success” means: an artist who can headline in London and still show up for the people who streamed them into relevance in the first place.
Only deliberate, economic, structural, and cultural choices will deliver that.
In the end, the real story isn’t that African artists want to be seen abroad.
It’s what it says about home that so many feel they have to leave to be seen at all.
