Mr Eazi has officially kicked off his Empawa program, an initiative created to help talents across Africa by sponsoring their music videos.
The Banku Music boss who recently released his second studio project, “Lagos To London” is moving to a new phase with his career, which involves providing a platform for emerging talents to get introduced to a wider community via music videos.
At an exclusive event held on Tuesday, November 20, Mr Eazi gathered members of the press, label executives and talent managers, where he unveiled the inspiration behind his Empawa project and rolled out the timeline of events.
Speaking on the inspiration behind the project, Mr Eazi says;
“Since 2016, I have been blessed to do music not only relevant to Nigeria but to the world. Back then, I was involved in Tech and a company asked people to submit tech ideas, from 440 people who submitted ideas, they brought it down to 12 and I was one of the 12.
“For about 4-6 weeks, they taught us everything and some of things I took from there like ‘boot-strapping’ and ‘data mining’ are what I have put to the music.
“Whilst I was doing the program, a friend who knew I used to do music for fun in the University paid for a dance video at about 300pounds and gave to me as a birthday gift and it began to grow viral.
“Basically people have funded videos for me, like ‘Skin Tight’ for instance, it was shot for about $1,000 (about N300,000), if someone had not shot that dance video or sponsored the ‘Skin Tight’ video, I won’t be here.”
Speaking further, he explained that he had built a policy where he doesn’t collect any form of payment for features with African artists
“Since 2016, I have made it a point to engage in CSR, both music and non, there is nobody in Nigeria that will say Mr Eazi did a song for me and I paid any amount. For Nigerian artists, I don’t charge for features.
“We have lowkey sponsored about six videos in the past two years… so I have decided to make it big and more formal.”
