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?

“There’s a structure that Asia has been able to incorporate,” Anthony told TechCabal. “I’m also taking a look at the numbers and the statistics comparing that to Afrobeats, and the stat is alarming—how they’re doing like 30 to 100 billion streams in a year, and Afrobeats is just doing like 30 [billion streams].”

It was an unlikely realisation for someone who had travelled to Thailand on a modest budget, intending to teach English while experiencing life in a different country. Yet that journey would leave her thinking as much about Nigeria’s creative economy as her own career.

The irony is that Anthony’s relationship with music began in a far less structured setting.

Growing up, mornings in her family home often began with the voices of Nigerian gospel singer Panam Percy Paul or American country musician Jim Reeves drifting through the house. 

Both of her parents sang in the church choir—her mother still does—and music was woven so naturally into family life that she…