Excel Joab: The Man Who Reads the Room

We are neighbors, Excel Joab and I. When either of us is frustrated about the industry, we walk to each other’s house and rant. It sounds like a small thing until you understand what it means to have someone nearby who is fluent in your music language, who shares the same vocabulary for what is going wrong and why. In a business that runs on relationships, that kind of proximity feels like infrastructure.

Excel came into music wanting to be a journalist. He was already writing articles, sharing opinions online, building the critical apparatus that good music writing requires. Then, at a listening party, he met Nigerian rap star M.I Abaga. After arriving early as he tends to do, M.I told him something that redirected the next decade of his life: “you like music too much. Someone like you should be in the music business.” He took that advice and found his way. Eleven years in, he has worked in media, content acquisition, digital streaming platforms, brand partnerships, distribution, A&R consulting, label operations, and artist management simultaneously, often in some combination of all of the above. He currently serves as A&R and Artist Development Manager for West Africa at AWAL, Sony Music’s sub-label, while managing artists, running a gospel label on the side, and keeping a front-row view of everything the industry is quietly getting wrong.

The journalism instinct never left him. If anything, it’s been sharpened by his time in the frontlines. Excel Joab talks about the Nigerian music industry the way a very good editor talks about a manuscript with real potential. Only that, the author keeps making the same preventable mistake.

When I ask him what hit him hardest when he first crossed over from the outside into the actual machinery of the business, he doesn’t hesitate.

“The level of work inside it shocked me.”

Xcel had not come in naive. Prior to music, he had worked HR for an airline. He had been a copywriter. A social media manager,and a digital marketing executive. He understood structure and deadlines and institutional demands. What he was not prepared for was an industry that runs without closing hours. Where order is more aspirational than actual practice. A realm of entropy where the gap between what the business looks like from outside and what it requires from inside is so wide, it routinely destroys people who enter with genuine passion but no tolerance for ambiguity.

He describes his saving grace as relational intelligence. “I am a relationship person. It’s easy for me to connect with people, and this is a very relationship-driven business. A lot of times, being able to achieve a deal is about who is on your phone contact that you can call, literally maybe 80% of the time.” But he is careful to distinguish between real relationship capital and the performance of it. The music business, he says, is full of people who mistake friendliness for alliance and mistake alliance for trust. The younger generation of executives, he worries, has grown up in a social media environment where reputation is visible and consequential in ways it never was before. and they haven’t yet developed the emotional steadiness to navigate that.

He puts it plainly: “You can’t expect everybody to be your friend. Maintaining relationships is more than just who is there for you.” If someone has said something unflattering about him, he checks whether it’s true. If it’s not true but the person is still useful for business, he keeps the door open. He does not burn bridges for business. If a shark bites him, he takes the lesson, updates what he trusts that person with, and moves forward. He frames this as the emotional maturity the industry demands and rarely cultivates.

The conversation turns, as it often does with Excel, toward what is structurally wrong with the market and why those structural problems keep reproducing themselves.

He brings up Beyoncé’s Coachella performance, the Netflix film, as a reference point he returns to regularly, for the intentionality therein. “She honored HBCUs. They were part of the band. She honored their traditions and cultures, even during the concert itself. That kind of intentionality you don’t see here with our people.” It’s a pointed observation about what it means to genuinely invest in your culture rather than extract from it. The artists who are currently at the top of the Nigerian market, he argues, have plateaued in part because they have not done that kind of thinking. They’ve hit a ceiling, one they cannot go past, because they haven’t built the foundation that would give them the thrust.

What makes this a structural problem rather than an individual failing is that the younger generation of artists is watching the current top tier for cues about how to operate, and what they are seeing is not great. “Children don’t do what you tell them, children do what they see you do.”

Beneath this is a harder argument about process. Excel is blunt about the fact that very few artists in the Nigerian market can reliably fill mid-size venues. He names Wizkid, Davido, Burna Boy, Rema, and suggests the list effectively ends there. Everything below that tier struggles to sell out halls that hold a few hundred people. And yet, he says, what you see from the generation coming up is not a serious reckoning with that gap. What you see is farming, buying chart positions, screenshotting a number one placement and posting it, then being unable to sell out a local park by December.

“We are horrible businessmen in this industry. We are horrible businessmen. It’s almost like we don’t think. We just want to do what the next person is doing,” he tells me.

The vanity metrics problem is real, he says, but it is symptomatic of something deeper: the absence of critical thinking, which he traces back to an education system that trained people to pass examinations rather than reason through problems. He and I push back and forth on this. I take it further down, all the way to childhood nutrition, the conditions that shape cognition before formal education even begins. He insists on education for causality, but the point is the same: people are not asking the foundational questions. They are not asking how recouping works, how promotion money flows, what it actually costs to push a record on radio in America, which runs north of $250,000 and is why every Nigerian act that has crossed over there is inside the major label system.

How about America? I inquire. Excel offers clarity to that question. He watched what happened when Def Jam tried and failed to move Nasty C to the US market. He expected the industry to absorb that lesson. It did not. The obsession with America as the singular destination for ambition, he says, is the same category error that Nigerian parents used to make when they insisted their children pursue oil and gas, law, or medicine. It’s a narrow definition of legitimacy that forecloses real possibility.

He was in Riyadh for a music festival. Saudi Arabians were walking up to his artist Wizard Chan at the festival grounds, fans who knew the songs, who wanted photographs. He has watched Ckay, another artist on his roster at AWAL, command genuine love across the Middle East and North Africa. These are real audiences, providing real money and real cultural resonance. African music, he says, has never needed permission to be loved internationally. “We have always had that great rhythm and sound that the world has never been able to say no to.” The problem is not the music’s reach. The problem is the commercial infrastructure around it, and the assumption that one geography represents the whole of the possible.

He sees Afro House as the next vector of international movement, European house DJs and Nigerian artists converging on a shared sonic space, the kind of organic cross-pollination that does not require a bidding war or a major label co-sign to generate a consistent footprint.

What Excel looks for when he is deciding whether to invest his attention in an artist, the question underneath all the industry diagnosis, is authenticity. Authenticity that he can assess structurally. He talks about Odumodublvck, a friend and a genuine troublemaker in the literal sense, someone whose public persona is not a construction but a direct expression of who he actually is.

“You can’t beat authenticity. If it is there, it’s there.”

He was initially worried that Odumodublvck’s energy would produce a predominantly male fanbase. But boy was he was wrong. Women love Odumodu as the Big Kala. Authenticity, Excel argues, is the one quality that does not erode over time, because it is not a performance that has to be maintained. An artist who is genuinely who they say they are at 25 will still be coherently themselves at 35. They will have grown, changed, but they will not have drifted away from what first made people pay attention. Those are the artists worth the long game.

He applies this same principle to what he says to younger artists when they come to him looking for either direct investment, links to a label, or a small cheque to get started. He tells them what they have now is not the obstacle. He tells them the Bible says he who is faithful in a few will be faithful in much. If you have twenty people who genuinely love your music, go and gather them. Do things with them. Build something real with what is already in your hands. An infusion of capital will not change the fundamental question of whether you know how to use it.

“If you cannot do anything with what you have now, it’s not when I give you $5,000 you would do miracles,” he explains.

He draws an analogy about men who couldn’t connect with women until they had a nice car, a swanky Lekki address and a certain kind of arrival in the world. He used to warn his female friends about that type. The confidence that only appears after external validation is not real confidence. It is a dependency that will express itself in harmful ways. The same, he says, applies to artists who are waiting for the industry to recognize them before they start doing the work.

None of this makes Excel a pessimist. He holds something rarer than optimism: a clear-eyed assessment of what is broken alongside a genuine belief that it can be fixed.

He talks about the next generation’s demographic advantage. Nigeria’s population skews overwhelmingly young, 70 percent or more under 35. That is a country full of people who need new voices, new artists to represent what they feel and who they are. He points to Mavo as evidence that this demand is real and active. Mavo broke through because he brought something emotionally specific that his generation recognized in themselves. That need doesn’t go away. Every generation produces it.

What he remains troubled by is the pattern of extraction, the way people who have held positions in this industry have not left things better for the people coming behind them. He uses Nollywood as the parallel: Netflix arrived, Prime arrived, money came in, funds were mismanaged, quality control failed, and now those platforms have left in under five years. The next generation of filmmakers are paying for it. The same logic applies in music. Investment came. Some of it was used well. A great deal of it was not. And the people who will carry the weight of that squandered opportunity are the artists coming up now.

“I’ve seen Hamilton twice in London, and every time I watch it, when I’m leaving, I’m thinking: when will I go and watch a theater show on this level in Nigeria?” he asks.

He says it with a quiet intensity that is closer to grief. Grief at the gap between what he knows this country is capable of and what it is currently producing. He still has faith. He says it directly, without hedging. He still believes a few good men and women can change a great deal. He still believes the music is strong enough to carry the industry further than the industry has allowed it to go.

I believe him. And I think about the fact that he walked out of his house and down the street to record this conversation. Which is exactly the kind of proximity, the willingness to show up and say the true thing to someone you can trust, that he says powers everything.

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