Ava Anthony arrived in Thailand expecting little more than a holiday. What she found instead unsettled the way she thought about music.
One evening, inside a jazz bar, she watched performers whose ease on stage felt almost rehearsed into instinct. Beyond the live performances, she discovered an industry built on years of deliberate preparation, in which aspiring artists could spend seven to nine years training before a record label would consider them ready to debut.
For Anthony, a Nigerian singer-songwriter who performs under the stage name ‘Denle,’ the experience raised an uncomfortable question.
If Afrobeats has become one of the world’s fastest-growing music genres with far less formal preparation, what could it become if artists developed within similarly structured systems?
Originally published by TechCabal.