Much Ado About Collaborations!

Collaboration: the action of working with someone to produce something, a simple Oxford dictionary definition for a word that has come to dominate the music space, the world over. Something that seems to be a criteria for the process of an artiste's career to "Blow" as we loosely claim is success.

The first question one gets asked as an Artiste is "who are you collaborating with?" / "who would you like to collaborate with?" / "are you going to feature anyone on your track?" etc Often, the look of disappointment on the face of the person asking is priceless when the answer is not in the affirmative, but the thing for me is how so projects now seem like a taboo of some sort.

In any business, collaborations are important, afterall no man is an island, but if you look closely, you'd find that every music project is a collaborative effort - I don't make the beats of my song, and even then, there's a sound engineer who would mix and deliver the final output; so why is this not enough as far as a feature is concerned? In reality, no music project, single, EP or Album is complete without a number of hands getting on board to create and finish up the work, in many cases, with more than one Songwriter, yet we are only ever satisfied if the output of the song is one that features one or two or even more voices. 

I read on Wikipedia that in classical music, it is relatively rare for a work to be written in collaboration by multiple composers. This contrasts with popular music, where it is common for more than one person to contribute to the music for a song. Nevertheless, there are instances of collaborative classical music compositions that date as far back as 1656, "The Siege of Rhodes"  was a piece written in London, and is considered to be the first English opera hence the first actual commercial music. The vocal music was by Henry Lawes, Matthew Locke, and Captain Henry Cooke, and the instrumental music is by Charles Coleman and George Hudson. One can argue that it became the first commercial successful one because it had a multiple number of people on it, but the Habdels, Beethovens and Mozarts all stands alone. 

In present time, the biggest songs have been of collaborative efforts. At present, Wizkid's "Essence" featuring Tems is the Rave of the globe, topping charts and giving young Tems a chance to stand alone as a world music force. Like that wasn't enough, Justin Beiber jumped on it and had further propelled it across a larger audience.

Music business professionals argue that collaborations expand the artistes' audience, and opens them to the possibility of a new fan base. The thoughts are even that working with a producer and a whole team of engineers doesn't make much for a collaboration per say, if this is so, what happens to songs like DJ Neptune's "Nobody" featuring Joe boy? Or a song like DJ Spinall's "Baba" featuring Kizz Daniel, and such like tunes? We then think of old artistes who were stand alone acts and did so well solo, but have had to go with the trend and collaborate with younger artists, in the terms of the industry - "to stay relevant" and/or "re-invent themselves. 

Over time, we've also seen artists who have stood alone and built their careers by starting true top their crafts and developing on their sounds over the years, working with producers from different parts of the world and blending their voices with different sounds, many of whom got to a certain stage before featuring anyone else on their tracks. What do you think? Should every artistes go head-on into collaborations and expand their audience in the start, or start out and collaborate after a while? Or are you one who doesn't believe in collaborations and is so why? Let us in on your thoughts about this at [email protected] 

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Hembadoon is a Singer, Songwriter and Artiste & Label Services Director for Nigeria and Anglophone West Africa with TuneAfrique Distribution. With the team, she is currently on a drive to get as many artists in the inner cities of Nigeria to take advantage of the DIY opportunity available on TuneAfrique.com to monetize their music. Her music "Lady", "Hey Lover", cultural single "Kule Kule Hemba Ayem" and others are distributed through TuneAfrique and available on all digital music platforms. FB @hembabubba | IG @hembabubba | T @hembabubba