Don Jazzy, the CEO of Mavin Records, says the cost of promoting an artiste varies dramatically depending on the scale and type of release.
In a recent interview with Bounce FM, the music producer revealed that promotional campaigns for a single song can range from $100,000 to over one million dollars, with global ambitions requiring significantly more.
He used the phenomenal success of Rema’s ‘Calm Down’ as a prime example. The track, initially released in February 2022 from Rema’s debut album ‘Rave & Roses’, showed immense early promise.
The song’s potential, Don Jazzy said, justified escalating the investment.
“It varies. I used to say it keeps changing. Sometimes, it can be $100,000 or more. Is it an EP, an album, or a single?” he said.
“(For two singles). It can be $300,000 for promotion in Nigeria. Everything is in process. You have to get some level of traction before you now decide when to pump money globally. It also depends on the applications or websites.
“For a song like ‘Calm Down’, we probably spent close to $4 million to $5 million to get it to where it is. The song has to show tractions. You will now say, as you have conquered this place, you will spend the next money, you go to the next phase. Ask people who have done such a thing in the past. Lifestyle is costly, only you do not know.
“There are songs or artistes that we have blown (sic) with N10 million.”
Rema later partnered with Selena Gomez, the US songstress, for the remix of the hit track in August of the same year.
The song went platinum in the United Kingdom in March 2023, and also became India’s second longest-charting no 1 African song. It was named the longest-charting African song on Billboard Hot 100 in June of 2024.
Last year, ‘Calm Down’ became Billboard’s longest-charting US Afrobeats song with 52 weeks while in September of the same year, it hit one billion streams on Spotify.
As of December, the song’s remix is the most-viewed Nigerian music video on YouTube with 1.2 billion.
Born Divine Ikubor, Rema signed with D’Prince’s Jonzing World, a subsidiary of Mavin Records, in 2019.
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