African music has spent the last decade proving it can travel. Afrobeats records chart globally. Labels hunt the next breakout act. Platforms race to sign, stream and monetise talent. What has not kept pace, says Babatunde Makinde, is the profession that often makes those careers possible.
Makinde is founder of A&R Duty, a music-tech company building tools, intelligence and infrastructure for A&Rs; the scouts and developers who find artists, shape sound, connect collaborators and turn raw talent into catalogues worth millions. After more than a decade in A&R, artist development, talent management, creative strategy and music marketing, he says the industry’s blind spot is no longer discovery. It is what happens to the people doing the discovering.
“An A&R can help discover an artist, shape their sound, connect the right collaborators, guide a project and ultimately contribute to building a career worth millions of dollars and still receive very little recognition or fair treatment for the value they created.”
That imbalance is the starting point for A&R Duty. The company’s question is blunt: who is building the people who build the artists?
The problem the industry treated as normal
