Talent Without Structure Is Frustration

I have been in this industry for fifteen years and I can tell you the least scarce resource in it is talent. Walk into any studio in Lagos on a Tuesday night. The ability is not the problem.

What is scarce is structure. Release planning. Audience ownership. Catalogue strategy. Knowing which of the four things in front of you actually moves the number, and doing that one first.

The pattern I keep seeing

An artist makes something genuinely good. It gets a moment. The moment arrives and there is nothing built to catch it. No email capture, no follow-up single ready, no press kit, nobody briefed. Three weeks later the moment is gone and the artist concludes the industry is rigged.

The industry is difficult. It is not rigged. The moment came and there was no container for it.

What structure actually means

People hear the word and think of spreadsheets. It is simpler than that. Structure is knowing, before the record comes out, the answers to five questions:

• Who is this for, specifically, and where do they already spend their attention
• What happens in the seventy two hours after release
• What you want somebody to do after they hear it, in one sentence
• What the second and third pieces of content are, and whether they already exist
• How you reach these people again without paying for it

Most rollouts I am shown have an answer to none of these. The song is finished and the plan is to post it.

I have watched better singers lose to worse singers with better plans, for fifteen years. At some point that stops being bad luck and starts being the lesson.

The uncomfortable part

Structure is unglamorous. Nobody posts about their release calendar. But the gap between the artists who are still here in five years and the ones who are not has almost nothing to do with who was more gifted at the start.