EXECUTIVE OF THE WEEK: ADEMOLA ALUGO

Seyi Vibez has been of 2023's best offerings. He’s dropped 3 albums over the course of six months which all debuted in the Top 3 positions of the Albums Charts. 

 ‘Billion Dollar Baby 2.0’ spent 14 weeks at the No. 1 spot on the Album Charts — amassing over 131 million on-demand streams in 2023, making it the second most streamed album of the year. His success is not limited to his albums, as ‘Gwagwalada’, a song featuring BNXN and Kizz Daniel also made its mark on the charts. The song made No.1 on the Streaming charts and spent 4 weeks on that spot.

His other albums also performed brilliantly earning over 231.6 million on-demand streams, making him the 2nd highest streamed artiste in the first half of 2023.

In this edition of EOTW, we have a chat with Ademola Alugo, head of the marketing team that worked with Seyi Vibez on his albums this year and find out how they were able to release multiple projects in a short time frame without skipping out on the quality of music.

TTC: Please introduce yourself, let’s get to know you.

Ademola: My name is Ademola Alugo. I am the senior vice president and head of operations at Dapper Music. I started working at Dapper Music with Dapper himself in 2019. My job roles changed as the company and I have worked on setting up the label part, management part and my duties in terms of management is like senior vice president but my duties in terms of my day to day is music distribution and we have about 3000+ clients we cater to with some of them being notable artistes like Omah Lay, Tems, Seyi Vibez and others. That’s pretty much what my job entails.

TTC: You’re the executive of the week due to your contribution in the release of Seyi Vibez’s recent album “Thy Kingdom Come”. The album, which is his 4th project in less than a year, was successful enough to debut in top 3 of the Top 50 albums chart. Can you tell us the plans that were made toward the release of this particular album?

Ademola: One misconception about Seyi Vibes is that because he is an Afrobeats artiste who sings predominantly in Yoruba, he doesn’t have range. The truth is that Seyi is a really talented artiste and that his recent projects showed that he not only has a versatile side to his music, but that he also has mastery of different genres, like Fuji, Afro-Adura, Amapiano and even Highlife.

TTC: if we were to talk more about his album releases, he has had 3 albums in the top 10 of the album charts, which is the most that any artiste has ever had. Why did he release so many projects in a short while and what was the strategy behind them?

 Ademola: Why not? Olamide used to be like that back in the day too, dropping bodies of work back to back. I believe if you have created magic and you’d rather put it as an album rather than release in singles, then you should. These things depend on the type of artiste and his team. That’s why my team and I made the perfect fit for Seyi Vibes. Like the other artistes we have worked with, we understood his vision as soon as we had our first meeting with him.

Funny enough, we still have songs that Seyi Vibez hasn’t released yet that we are working on and from what we have right now, it is pretty clear that once they drop, the listeners are going to go crazy over them.

In the view of strategies that we employed in putting out the most recent projects, we’re just going to put out a surprise album, he was just doing a snippet and we were like “You know what, we can make this work” and that was how we started. There was a compilation and we selected some songs that made the cut and we decided to put out a side A which was the “Vibes till thy kingdom come” and the side B which was the “Thy Kingdom come” part. 

So really, why not? Like the talent is there, the songs are available and you can’t put out just one song when you have hundreds of songs available, so why not just give the people what they want and deserve to listen to?

TTC: Seyi Vibez is undoubtedly a very gifted and vibrant artist, he has given us hits after hits during the first half of the year, and so should we be expecting the same energy during the second half of the year?

Ademola: You can surely expect more great music from him. He’s having a homecoming concert coming up on Sunday in his hometown, specially planned for his day one fans. Then, he is headlining his first major event in London in August. He also has a tour coming up, and he might just drop another project before the end of the year.

“It’s just really exciting to work with someone with so much talent and versatility. I don’t know if you’re aware of this but Seyi Vibez is the second highest streamed artist on Audiomack only behind Burna Boy…”