I Spoke at Meta About Building This

In 2020, I was sitting in my apartment in Ajah, watching editorial budgets dry up across international publications. The commissions I’d relied on were thinning out. I’d built a reputation as a troublemaker in the Nigerian music industry—someone who asked difficult questions and wrote uncomfortable truths—and that reputation, while earned, came with professional costs. People were retreating. The walls were closing in.

So I started a newsletter.

It wasn’t a grand vision at first. It was survival. Every Monday, I’d sit down and write about African music—the business, the culture, the stories nobody else was telling. I called it Afrobeats Intelligence. Over time, tens of thousands of you subscribed. You showed up. You read. You cared about the work.

Eventually, I bought equipment and turned the newsletter into a podcast. Not because I had a production budget or a media partner, but because I believed in documenting this moment. I believed in archiving the spirit of what we were building—the artists, the sound, the movement—before it disappeared into the blur of viral clips and algorithm-fed nostalgia.

Last month, I was invited to speak on a panel at Meta’s EMEA Communications Offsite in London. The session was called Fuel for the Feed: Creative Lessons from New Media, and I sat alongside some of the most innovative independent media builders in Europe—Laurence Moss from The Brit Spot, Alma Fabiani from SCREENSHOT Media, and Julia Czub from Newonce. We spoke to Meta’s communications team about how creators like us are disrupting traditional media, building direct relationships with audiences, and creating value in spaces the industry overlooked.

It was a strange and humbling full-circle moment. Seven years ago, I was pitching editors with a spreadsheet, trying to convince them that Afrobeats mattered. Now I was in a room with one of the most powerful media companies in the world, explaining how independent platforms—newsletters, podcasts, social publishers—have become essential to how people consume culture.

What I talked about on that panel was something you already know if you’ve been reading this newsletter: the power of moving from the niche to the center without losing your voice. When I started Afrobeats Intelligence, I wasn’t trying to be mainstream. I was trying to be real. I was trying to tell deeper stories, the kind that take time and care, the kind that don’t fit into 60-second TikToks or headline-optimized clickbait. I was exploring. I was being intentional about what I archived and why.

But over time, that niche became a reference point. It became infrastructure. And now, what started as a reaction to being shut out has become a space that artists, executives, and listeners trust. That’s the power of independent media: you build your own platform, you control your narrative, and if you do it with integrity, the audience finds you. The brands find you. The world finds you.

On that panel, I talked about the machinery that powers this work—the consistency, the relationship with your audience, the balance between artistic exploration and commercial sustainability. I talked about what it means to stay rooted in your mission even as the opportunities grow. I talked about the responsibility of documenting culture as it happens, not after the fact, because we’ve lost too much African music history already to poor archiving and Western gatekeepers.

I’m grateful. Grateful to OkayAfrica for investing in Afrobeats Intelligence and believing in the vision. Grateful to Meta for the platform to share these lessons with people building the future of media. Grateful to you for supporting this work from the beginning.

This panel wasn’t just about me. It was about what we’re all building—independent voices, creator-led platforms, and new ways of documenting culture. If you want to see what I said about the journey from newsletter to podcast, from niche to the mainstream, and what I think the future of media looks like, [you can watch it here].

Let me know what resonates. Let me know what questions you have. This is still a conversation.

Onward,
Joey