Music collabos guarantee success

As a self-confessed music fan, I must admit I admire the beauty that music collaborations bring in the art.

Globally, the music landscape has been coloured by some potent collaborations, whose melodies have resounded beyond our imagination to feed our hunger for music. I can mention the known collaborations by Bono of U2 and Mary J Blige on One Love, Usher and Alicia Keys on My Boo, Kelly and Nelly on Dilemma, Faouzia and John Legend on Minefields and 50 Cent and The Game on Hate It or Love It, among others.

On the local scene, we have also been served with some of the undoubtedly beautiful music collaborations yet. They include Lucius Banda and George Mkandawire’s Ndani Akanadziwa, Kalata Yachitatu by Lucius Banda and Thomas Chibade, Martse, Hyphen and Barry One on Mkatimo, among others.

The beauty with music collabos is that each artist brings on the table his unique qualities. Once a producer finds a good balance for each individual input, what usually comes out is a work worth marvelling.

What is borne out of that is usually a rare fusion that retains the identities of the artists in question. Beyond this, the artists are guaranteed an opportunity to prey on each other’s audiences. You may not like a particular artist, but once they collaborate with your favourite artist, surely that leaves you with no choice, but to sample his work.

In so doing, some new fans are won over by that small game of exchange. It is wins all the way.

The scope is even bigger and better when we have artists from two different countries on a duet. In that set-up you are assured of those productions being shared and listened to in those two countries.

With the coming of online streaming sites and its mode of remuneration, numbers have become the focal point of the trade. If as an artist you can’t garner the required numbers online, then your opportunities to break even are threatened or almost zero.

Geographically, some countries are endowed with bigger populations than others. That on its own places an advantage on the artists coming from that particular location when it comes to pushing content online.

Then we also have to factor in issues of advancement of technology and the level of access to internet facilities. Understandably, we have some countries who are at an advantage when we consider these parameters.

Some artists have basically rode on the fact that they come from zones which have these factors in their favour. For those artists coming from disadvantaged locations, for them to break even they need to toil like slaves and be strategic as well.

Now that is where the power of cross-border collabos come in. Such collabos are the only sure way of allowing one to sample a market away from one’s home confines. 

What has brought me to all this collaboration talk today is the debate that has ensued following the trending song So Mone by Zambia’s Yo Maps which features Malawi’s rapper Tay Grin. His contribution in the song has been undermined by the measurement of others.

They have even gone further to suggest that Tay Grin shouldn’t share in spoils of the records and success the song is amassing because it is not originally his. This even compelled the artist to make a statement through his Facebook page to explain how the dynamics of such arrangements work.

Whether his distractors have gotten the message he was trying to send home or not, we don’t know. But one thing people need to understand is that Tay Grin’s signature has been engraved on that song for eternity.

Whether that song will go on to win a Grammy award, Tay Grin will enjoy the right to stand on the podium together with Yo Maps to receive that particular award. Such is the beauty of collaborations.

The music business requires one to be smart beyond having talent. You should know which buttons to press and where to locate yourself for extra visibility and gains. Yo Maps is one artist that has gained acclaim in this region and continues to rise.

By collaborating with him, Tay Grin has automatically stepped in the domain of his wide followership. Regardless of how much he contributed to the track in question, but surely Tay Grin is assured of a win on this one.