The Naija Lookbook: How Burna Boy, Davido, and Wizkid Built a Global Music Industry From Lagos in Under a Decade

The Naija Lookbook: How Burna Boy, Davido, and Wizkid Built a Global Music Industry From Lagos in Under a Decade

The Naija Lookbook goes beyond the headlines. What Nigeria does better than anyone — with the receipts.

Ten years ago, if you told a Universal Music executive in Los Angeles that a song recorded in Lagos would hit number one in fifteen countries simultaneously, he would have laughed. Nigerian music was a regional category. It had Fela Kuti in the canon and a diaspora audience in London and New York. But it was not, in any serious industrial sense, a global music business.