Op-Ed: Like Moliy and Tyla, More African Artists Should Lean Into Long-Term Music Promotion

In an interview with OkayAfrica back then, Jones said, “The goal was never just about going viral overnight. We focused on building a real connection with listeners over time, making sure the song lived beyond just the initial hype.”

“We wanted to attach the song to memorable content you would question and watch again. That meant teasing the record early, creating consistent content around it, and getting people involved in a way that felt natural. Instead of forcing it, we let the song breathe, allowing it to take on a life of its own and people to discover it at their own pace,” she added.

For Moliy, Jones said the goal was to first establish a strong fanbase and then find ways to make the song fresh and exciting once it came out. “Whether it was through dance, or just engaging with the fans who organically loved it, and eventually the remixes.”

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This is a strategy that has since paid off. Since its release, “Shake It To The Max” has spawned numerous remixes, risen on the Billboard charts, and has made Moliy the biggest Ghanaian artist, by numbers, working today.

Like most songs released during the age of TikTok and dance challenges, “Shake It To The Max” was first a teaser that was already going viral on social media, complete with its own dance that was being replicated by numerous creators. Before the release, the teaser had amassed thousands of videos, many of which featured people covering their faces with their palms and grinding their waists in sync to the dancehall track.

But unlike most songs, Moliy and Jones didn’t stop promoting it after its release. This is a crucial mistake that comes up a lot for many African artists who rely on the wave of their pre-release promotion to keep their project relevant afterwards.

“We didn’t want to go by any rules that limited how this record would reach people,” Jones now tells OkayAfrica nearly a year after the song was released.

This laser-sharp focus has given the single a long shelf life. Many months after its promotion, you can still hear it on TikTok, and it is still a subject of interest. It’s an incredible strategy at a time when quantity is valued over quality, and it could change how new-age artists approach their work.

Music doesn’t come with an expiration date

Dapo Amusat, who runs WeTalkSound, a music and culture company, describes Moliy’s promotional strategy as impressive. “The truth is, music doesn’t come with an expiry date. A song’s lifespan depends on how it is presented, how much the artist believes in it, and when the right audience finally discovers it,” Amusat tells OkayAfrica.

“Every song is intellectual property — it’s an asset — and artists need to treat it that way. Long-term promotion can take many forms: challenges, reactivations online, live versions, DJ remixes, or pushing the record into new territories. All of these approaches not only extend a song’s life but also build a stronger catalogue of work with lasting value.”

Amusat's framing of every song and project as intellectual property is a helpful way for African artists to consider their projects. In recent times, a pattern of voluminous release is saturating the market and leaving listeners with few standout records. With a low barrier for entry and a wealth of options, the easiest way to establish a career in an age of abundant options is through repetition, which will likely leave an impression. When there are so many impressive artists and options, the artists who make it are the ones who can swim through the current of mass production.

And now more than ever, African artists need to swim through the current.

A new game plan?

Since 2024, a lull has settled over the broader African music industry. It’s a lull that made itself comfortable right after the explosive wave of interest in Afrobeats and African music in the latter part of the 2020s. Songs like Wizkid and Tems’ “Essence,” Ckay’s “Love Nwantiti,” Asake’s “Joha,” and King Promise’s “Terminator” were catapulted via the novelty of platforms like TikTok and a thirst, on the global front, for something fresh and interesting.

Between 2020 and 2023, the industry enjoyed a wave of exciting new talent and voices. African artists made relatively regular appearances on the Billboard Hot 100 charts, and there were a handful of hits and breakout stars to choose from. It was towards the end of that era that Tyla, another artist whose strategy also involves long-term promotions, emerged, taking home her first award at the Grammys for her hit “Water.”

However, much of that promise has tapered off in the past year. Hit singles have become scarce, and while many African artists are releasing albums and making their way up the charts, on the ground, there has been a breakthrough problem. As observed in The Guardian by Joey Akan, host of Afrobeats Intelligence, now presented by OkayAfrica, “Nigeria has an average of two breakthrough artists a year — a trend that has persisted for the last decade. Midway through 2024, the country is struggling to break new musicians. Emerging Nigerian artists release nearly a hundred records a week on Spotify. None have become big hits in 2024. With fewer artists being seeded at the highest levels, the scene appears to have reached a saturation point.”

Put simply, the African music industry has become increasingly challenging for new voices to break through, and those already established are struggling to maintain their cultural foothold. These two problems can be linked to the same argument: our songs have very brief shelf lives. The African music industry needs to return to a period where one song could soundtrack the entire year. It’s hard to remember a song that has soundtracked a quarter.

This is where a culture of long-term promotion could come in. As evidenced by Moliy’s success and Tyla’s strategy, African artists, especially independent and emerging acts, can lean intentionally into the long-term promotion tactic. This also applies to the big-name artists.

Amusat explains that much of the reason why artists have veered away from long-term promotions can be blamed on the structure of record label deals, which prioritise volume over extensive impact. “The structure of many deals, especially advances, pushes artists to release a lot of music quickly instead of nurturing one record for a long time. Where artists used to drop an album every one or two years, we now see multiple projects within a single year,” he says.

Long-term promotions have the potential to make artists memorable. In Moliy’s case, it has made her calculated without coming across as dishonest, intentional, and ambitious without looking engineered.

Jones says that the biggest strategy for long-term promotion for an artist with a limited budget is to follow the data. “It’s easy to get caught up in roll-outs and timelines that you get bored and feel like you’re pushing the same thing over and over. But we’re in a new digital age where the world can find you based on the algorithm, and that algorithm is repetitive. Think of the content you see over and over on different platforms? Someone sees that for the first time every week or in a few months based on their current social media patterns.”

By allowing a song to have a long shelf-life, artists have a chance to give it enough time to reach a wider audience instead of putting it away after a month or two post-release. While long-term promotions can be expensive, especially with labels looking to recoup their investment quickly, the strategy still holds strong merit. “For alternative or independent artists, there’s more room to take a slower, authentic approach,” Amusat says, while acknowledging that pop artists signed to big labels might not have that luxury as “the system doesn’t really allow it.”

“Still, the digital era offers one silver lining: nothing completely disappears. Even if a song doesn’t blow up right away, all the content and groundwork around it remains online, ready to resurface and find new life years down the line.”