There is a story Sarz tells about the first time he sat in a real American studio, and it is not really a story about America. He had been flown in, nervous, looking for an A&R rep, when he noticed Timbaland through a glass door, making a beat with another artist like it was nothing. He peered in until security moved him along. Upstairs, another room held Swizz Beatz. Eventually Sarz found his own room, plugged in, and started playing tracks for an A&R who wanted something with an Afro house feel. When one of the beats landed, the executive told him to turn it up. Sarz cranked the volume until it was, in his words, “the loudest, but I kept like just making this seem like, oh my god, there’s something faulty, there’s something wrong with this.”
His computer was not malfunctioning. He was discovering, in real time, that everyone around him was simply working at a volume he had never been conditioned to reach. “In that moment I knew, like, yeah, you got to step it up,” he says. “You got to establish it up when their volumes are louder.” It is a small, almost throwaway anecdote, the kind that gets cut from most interviews for being too granular. But it contains the entire architecture of how Sarz has built a career: notice the gap, absorb the discomfort of it, then quietly go practice until the gap closes.
That instinct, applied over and over across eighteen years, is why a producer who started out trying to sound like Timbaland is now the reason a generation of Nigerian artists know what their own drums are supposed to sound like.
“I’ve never received any residual income from Nigeria”
Sarz opens with a sentence that should stop anyone who thinks Afrobeats’ global ascent has been a clean financial story for the people who built its sound. I’ve never received any residual income from Nigeria, ever, ever, he says, flatly, the kind of flatness that comes from having said it to himself many times before saying it out loud. For most of his career, a producer’s entire economic reality was the advance, a flat fee paid up front, disconnected from whatever the song went on to do. Make a hit, and the money was already spent before the song even reached the public.
The arithmetic was brutal in its predictability. An artist scores a smash off a Sarz beat, buys a car, and the producer who built the engine under the song is still rubbing two dimes for next meal. Sarz describes this gap as a kind of structural injury, the sense that “a producer and an artist share equally the creative input to making a song, so why is one person taking all the financial benefits from that project, and you’re just in the back burner, not getting anything.”
He is careful, though, not to make this purely an indictment of artists or labels. When he tries to locate the source of the dysfunction, he comes up empty. “I don’t have all the answers,” he admits, gesturing at the existence of collecting societies like COSON without much faith that they have changed anything. “It feels maybe like it’s gatekept, or someone is doing something funny somewhere.” The shrug in that sentence is doing a lot of work. It is the familiar expression of many Lagos producers who’ve spent two decades inside a system, profited from it, helped build its biggest exports, and still cannot tell you with confidence where the money is supposed to flow and why it doesn’t.
What makes Sarz’s framing distinct from the standard producer-grievance narrative is where he takes the analysis next. He does not argue that the system needs to be fixed before he can be paid. He argues that waiting for the system to fix itself was never going to be a strategy. “I don’t believe that my destiny is tied around anyone else. I believe that I control my destiny,” he says, and that sentence becomes the spine of everything that follows, his pivot into making his own music, into ownership, into building things that pay him directly instead of things he hopes someone else remembers to pay him for.
The Don Jazzy fork in the road
Sarz draws a hard line through Afrobeats history, and he places himself on the wrong side of it for longer than he is comfortable admitting. “In the early to mid 2000s, you either have music of your own, featuring people, or you sign artists and have a record label,” he says. “I think that’s the only way you can be successful as a music producer. Any other way, if you’re just producing from one person to the other and just waiting for advances, you’re just living from hand to mouth, pretty much.
He names Don Jazzy directly as the producer who understood this earliest, building Mavin around a hits-with-a-bunch ownership model while others, Sarz included, were still working gig to gig, song to song, freelancing their way through a career without the benefit of equity. It is a notably ungenerous thing to admit about your own early choices in a public conversation, and Sarz does not soften it. “For other people like us that were just producing one person to the other, it was really a struggle.”
The fashion metaphor he reaches for to explain why producers without ownership eventually get sidelined is sharper than it first appears. “Sometimes you might like a brand, right? And this other brand is hot and new, comes out. Doesn’t mean that this brand is not creating pieces that you love, but you just want something, you want a change. So how hot can you really be before someone else takes over the same, and they’re eating off your share of the national cake.” Talent, in his accounting, has a shelf life that has nothing to do with whether the talent is still good. Attention moves. Only ownership stays put.
This is also where Sarz locates the specific mental health cost of producing without equity, a cost he describes with more precision than is typical in these conversations. It is not just the money. It is watching someone else’s life visibly transform off a song you built equally, while your own life stays exactly where it was. “You’re not getting paid for it, and there’s also no residual income. So really, how hard can you work before you crash out, right?” He frames the strain as something close to an identity injury: loving the work, needing the work to fund a life, and watching the two come apart in public, song after song.
What ownership actually requires
The instinct toward ownership, once Sarz committed to it, did not arrive with a manual. He is candid that there was no clean blueprint, no moment of strategic clarity. “I really, really liked the song, and I think that I wanted to share that with the world. No matter what, I just knew, like, I wanted to make that happen,” he explains. Asked if he crafted his own records as his own from the start, his answer is immediate: “yes, from the jump, everything!”
But the more striking part of Sarz’s ownership philosophy is his refusal to romanticize it as a complete answer. He has watched peers treat ownership as a kind of moral victory that ends the conversation, and he pushes back on that directly. “Some people talk about ownership and they’re like, oh, they swear by it, but if you own music, honey, music is just your living room, it’s not making nothing, it’s zero,” he says. “You also need to know how to work it. Knowing the licensing companies to work with, that can make your catalog profitable, that’s also as important as owning a catalog.”
It is a distinction that gets lost in most conversations about artist and producer empowerment, which tend to treat owning your masters as the finish line. Sarz considers it the starting line. He gestures toward the long arc of catalog value, creative products that turn a song made decades ago into a quarterly check that still clears. “You don’t know who you’re inspiring, you don’t know who’s gonna listen to your catalog somewhere down the line,” he says, and there is something almost generational in how he frames it. Ownership, not as a transaction closed in the moment, but as a bet placed on a future you will not be in the room to witness.
What America actually taught him
Sarz is unsentimental about what changed his relationship to his own work. It was not a creative epiphany. It was proximity to people who had better resources, were more disciplined, and less tolerant of mediocrity than the environment he came up in. “There’s really no room for mediocrity,” he says of his first encounters with the American studio system. “Excellence in everything that they do. They make sure it’s right, they don’t sleep.”
He is unusually direct about the discomfort of that comparison, and about how much it indicted the culture he had been operating in: “I really hate that culture, in the Nigerian space, like we celebrate mediocrity so much, and it annoys me, it annoys me so much.” The specific technical gap he identifies, that American producers were sending him reference beats that already sounded mastered. While in Nigeria, a song often only sounded finished once it was literally finished. This distinction became something he treated almost as a personal failure to correct. “Now I need to learn industry standard processes, and how to make my music sound as good as possible,” he says. “I just got obsessed with that.”
What is notable is how recently, in the scheme of Nigerian music history, basic professional polish was optional. Sarz describes a culture where producers and artists would tell you with pride that they didn’t mix or master their work. Where demos went out as final products because that’s simply what the workflow allowed. The shift from that world to one where artists now spend thousands of dollars per song on mixing happened, in his telling, inside his own working lifetime. He watched and participated in that correction.
The other shift globalization forced on him was more of a social form: a willingness to collaborate. Before exposure to the American system, Sarz says, working with other producers on a single track was treated almost as an admission of weakness. “How dare someone writes for? You got punished for having creative help,” he says, describing the old mentality. “Everyone felt like doing things by yourself is the way. Collaborating with another person takes away from your creative genius.” Seeing how routinely the biggest American records were built by rooms full of collaborators, ten people on a track with nobody pretending otherwise, dismantled that instinct for him completely. It is worth noting how much of his catalog since, the records that move across continents, depends on a willingness to share credit. He describes himself as having had to unlearn resisting collaboration.
The sound that resists being one thing
Ask Sarz why his drums are recognizable in seconds, and he does not reach for technical language. He reaches for instinct, almost genetics. “I noticed that I did not care for lyrics, I was driven by beats,” he says of his earliest listening habits, citing Timbaland and the Neptunes as the producers who taught him to choose a song by its architecture rather than its words. “Even till date, when I’m working with artists, I don’t really care for lyrics, I care about melodies and the beats. I think this is already in my DNA.”
His origin, by his own account, is hip hop, not Afrobeats. “I would even say by heart I’m more hip hop than anything else,” he explains, tracing a counterfactual career where, if his early circle had been different, he might have ended up a straightforward hip hop producer instead of the architect of a specific Afrobeats drum signature. What redirected him was proximity to a different set of collaborators. Yoruba producers who mocked him for not speaking the language fluently despite a lifetime in Lagos. Gifted peers who were playing KWAM1 while he was reaching for Timbaland’s drum patterns. Rather than abandon either influence, he describes deliberately fusing them. He mixed hip hop’s low end with the textures the people around him were playing.
The result, in his framing, is a kind of authenticity that resists easy classification. “You can take Happiness, for example,” he says of one of his records. “It has some pop, some amapiano, some Afrobeats, some funk. But it sounds like its own thing. It doesn’t just sound like, oh, you just brought things together that don’t work. I brought them together, and it works in an authentic way that can live on its own.” He describes this synthesis instinct as his core production skill, distinct from any single genre fluency. Simply put, it is the ability to recognize which disparate elements will cohere before he has proof that they will.
Eighteen years and the discipline of not waking up passionate
There is a moment in the conversation where Sarz says something that cuts directly against the mythology most people build around long, successful creative careers. “You don’t wake up passionate, feeling like, oh, you know, today I want to create, not as much as you used to do, like, years down the line,” he says. “The flame is a bit tempered, even if it’s there, it’s tempered by experiences.”
This is, in effect, an eighteen-year producer telling you that the romantic version of a creative calling, the idea that passion simply renews itself daily, is mostly fiction once survival has been attached to the work for long enough. He distinguishes sharply between creativity practiced as pure passion, where rejection costs nothing because there was no expectation attached. And creativity practiced as a livelihood, where the same rejection becomes a referendum on whether you can keep affording your life. “When it’s not working for work, it becomes a mental problem,” he says. “What can I do? What else can I do?”
What Sarz prescribes instead of perpetual inspiration is structure. Discipline built specifically to function on the days the passion does not show up on its own. “I’ve also been able to build the discipline for when, for the times I wake up,” he shares, framing the habit less as motivation and more as a scaffolding holding the work together on the days motivation fails to. He links this explicitly to the gym, a relatively recent addition to his routine that he describes as training the same muscle he uses in the studio. “Working out for me has built so much discipline. It’s not just about looking your best, it’s also about showing up when you don’t feel like it. This is why sometimes when I don’t even feel like producing, I could just stand up and go.”
Reinvention as a discipline, not a pivot
The arc of Sarz’s career resists the standard narrative of a producer who found a lane and stayed in it. Production led to artistry, which led to DJing, which has now led to a far more public-facing, camera-forward version of him than existed for most of his career. He is candid that none of these expansions came naturally. “DJing wasn’t easy, because it puts me in front of people,” he says. He describes how, despite already being a recognized name, he initially tried to hide that he was DJing at all. He was uncomfortable with the visibility, until a hype man’s introduction made hiding impossible. From that discomfort to selling out his first London show is, according to him, a direct function of consistency rather than confidence. “Just follow through, just stay consistent, and eventually it will make sense.”
He frames this pattern of expansion not as restlessness but as a deliberate strategy for staying relevant across format shifts he did not choose. Word of mouth built his name when there was nothing else to build it on. Twitter amplified his voice once people could speak more directly. Instagram opened a process-sharing era. Now, he says, “we are in a creation era and an interest era, where sometimes even speaking about things you’re interested in would bring a flock of people to you.” His advice for navigating that, stripped of jargon, is almost severe in its simplicity: “find your voice in every era, find the things you’re comfortable in, and double down.”
He is unusually willing to admit that some of what looks, from the outside, like calculated marketing was not calculated at all. Asked about going shirtless in recent visuals, including the cover of his most recent album, he resists the framing that it was a strategy. “I wouldn’t say I used it for marketing,” he says. When pressed, he concedes the obvious: it helped. “It’s a beautiful thing to see what your body can do.” The exchange is small, but it captures something true about how reinvention actually works for him: less a marketing plan executed on schedule, and more an accumulation of genuine interests. Whether fitness, technology, fashion, or DJing, he allows himself to follow without forcing them into a content calendar first.
The economics underneath the music
Sarz resists, more than once, the instinct to make Afrobeats’ structural problems sound like an Afrobeats-specific story. When the conversation turns to why Nigerian and African artists still cannot reliably tour or perform at scale at home, he locates the actual bottleneck somewhere upstream of music entirely. “I think it’s the economic problem. If we have more buying power, a lot of things will change,” he explains, pointing to the naira’s depreciation as a force quietly determining what concerts, venues, and infrastructure are even financially possible.
He extends that economic diagnosis into a broader cultural one when the conversation turns to why Africans, in his own blunt framing, struggle to organize collectively even when collective action would clearly benefit everyone. He traces it to scarcity itself: a population conditioned by survival to focus resources on themselves and their own. With the rare collective gains in the culture’s history typically arriving as one person’s individual breakthrough that everyone else later copies, rather than coordinated effort from the start. It is a theory of Afrobeats’ fragmentation that has nothing to do with music and everything to do with what scarcity does to a generation’s instincts.
And yet, against that backdrop, Sarz refuses the easy cynicism about how Afrobeats globalized, including the now-common critique that foreign investment compromised something pure about the genre’s rise. “I don’t even think that, when they say we allowed foreign investors into Afrobeats,” he says, before cutting the thought off with a question he clearly considers unanswerable any other way. “What was the other option?” He describes, with evident frustration, the era before foreign capital entered the picture, when a producer behind a song playing across the entire country could still end up gifted a used Camry by a grateful artist. Treated as charity rather than as the compensation it should have been. “That’s crazy to me, he says. We’ve both done our work, it’s successful. The music should be working for us, and we should both be happy.”
Closing
After eighteen years as a professional, Sarz still narrates his career less as a string of hits than as a long negotiation with a structure that was never built to pay the people behind the sound. What makes his account distinct from a simple grievance narrative is the refusal to stop at diagnosis. Every structural complaint in this conversation, about residual income, about gatekeeping, about a culture that celebrates mediocrity, arrives paired with the same private correction: figure out what you control, and move there. “I don’t believe that my destiny is tied around anyone else,” he said at the very start. And eighteen years of drum patterns, catalogs, DJ sets, and shirtless album covers later, that sentence has held up as something closer to a method than a mood.
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