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What listeners owe the artists they disagree with, what artists owe the people who listen, and how money moves between them
There’s a good change that there is a song you listen to over and over again, that was made by someone who’s public choices you wholly disagree with. This song maybe got you through a bad period, or it is anchored to a particularly memorable experience, or it plays at the point in a party when the whole room knows all the words. But then, the artists goes on and appears on a podcast and shares some opinions you found unsavory, or worse, they attend an event for a political class you oppose, say something about the government that lands poorly, or even stay silent when that silence is seen as a statement in of itself. The song has not changed. But now, you’re faced with the dilemma of what to do with it.
That dilemma holds two questions that typically arrive at the same time. The first is whether the work still means something to you once you know what you know about the person who made it. The second is whether paying for it, through a stream, a ticket, a product or even a share, amounts to supporting them.
This piece covers these arguments on both sides, where an artist’s money comes from in Africa and more specifically, Nigeria, where the line sits between disagreeing with an artist and refusing their work, and a question fans have raised often: do artists owe the public a stand on things that affect everyone?
The phrase “seperate the art from the artist” has an academic ancestor. In 1967, the French critic Roland Barthes published “The Death Of The Author”, which appeared first in English in the American magazine Aspen, with a French version later in 1968. Barthes argued against reading a text through the writer’s life and identity. Tying a text to one author’s biography, he said, sets a ceiling on what it can mean.
In 1969 Michel Foucault gave a lecture called “What Is An Author?” that approached the subject through law. The author as a figure has a legal history. Societies needed someone to hold responsible for statements that broke the rules, and the name on the work supplied a person to punish. On that account, the author is a role that institutions created, and accountability comes attached to it.
Barthes has had critics ever since. The literary theorist Sean Burke wrote a book against him, “The Death and Return Of The Author”. Many listeners will recognize the objection from personal experience: knowing who made a song changes how it sounds, and you cannot un-know what you learned. Barthes wrote about reading, and who profits from the reading sits outside his argument. The African listener’s dilemma sits there. Interpretive freedom is real, so is the transaction, and the two press on each other.
The strongest argument for separation is that meaning gets made in the person receiving the work. A song written in one set of circumstances ends up playing in thousands of others. The listener supplies what it means in each of them, and the songwriter’s later opinions do not reach into those moments.
A second argument is practical. Artists hold the full range of views people hold, and a standard requiring agreement with every listener would shrink the catalogue fast. Anyone applying a strict test to their own playlist would watch it get short.
History lets us look at the question with the money removed. Caravaggio killed a man named Ranuccio Tomassoni in a duel on a Rome tennis court on 28 May 1606. He was sentenced to death in his absence and fled the city, sheltered for a time by the Colonna family, who had been among his patrons. His painting hands in churches and museums today, and the people standing in front of them are not funding him. But, that example has a limit, since it works because he cannot get paid. With a living artist the money is still moving, which is the reason to keep the interpretive question and the financial one apart before deciding how they connect.
The argument against separation has three parts. The first is that listening is a transaction. Streams generate royalties, tickets generate fees and merchandise generates sales. A listener who supports an artist financially hands them resources they can spend however they like, including on causes the listener opposes.
The second is attention. A large audience gives an artist a platform, and a platform gives their opinions weight. When a performer appears at an event, the organizers borrow some of that goodwill, and organizers book artist partly for that reason.
The third is the bond between fan and artist. Many listeners follow an artist because they feel the artist speaks for them. When the artists public choices drift from the listeners values, that closeness carries a cost, and some listeners find they can no longer hear the work without hearing the person.
Roxane Gay made the case in Marie Claire after finding she could no longer enjoy a show she grew up loving once she learned what its star had done. She argued that audience can no longer revere creative genius while ignoring the price often paid for it. In an interview, she also described ho people live with the gap between what they enjoy and what they know: they accept that sometimes they want what they want, even when its not good for them. Both camps pay something. Those who seperate accept they may be funding things they oppose. Those who refuse accept losing music that mattered to them.
Most examples in this debate involve artist who hurt people. The cases in Nigerian life in particular that this piece is focusing on involves something relatively milder: a booking, an alignment, or silence. These two situations deserve different answers, and treating them alive would be unfair to both.
A few questions help locate the line. Did the artist harm other people, or hold a view the listener rejects? Is the harm continuing, or does the artist still hold power over the people affected? Does the work carry the harm inside it, by glorifying it or depending on it? What has the artist done since, in acknowledgement or repair? And given all of that, what would my attention and money do?
Disagreement with an artist's politics sits at the milder end of those questions, and most listeners can keep the work and make a separate decision about money. The line moves when the politics shows up as harm to people, such as a political class whose actions hurt the listener's own community, or an artist who knowingly lends it credibility. At that point reasonable listeners will draw the line in different places, and I cannot draw it for them.
Foucault helps here. The author function exists so that someone can be held answerable. Barthes frees the reader to find meaning in the text, and Foucault keeps the author answerable for what they did. A listener can keep the work and still expect the artist to answer for their conduct.
The financial question has a factual answer in Nigeria, and the numbers change how the dilemma looks.
According to the Basslines to Billions market intelligence report, live events accounted for about 66 percent of Nigerian artists' total earnings. Industry estimates put earnings from concerts, festivals and tours at around US$395 million across 2024 and 2025. Streaming is a growing but smaller source, and brand endorsements and sponsorships have become a core income stream for top-tier artists.
Streaming pays little per play. Spotify's Loud & Clear report showed Nigerian artists generating over ₦60 billion from 30.3 billion streams in 2025, which works out to just under ₦2 per stream as at 2025. Subscription prices in Nigeria are among the lowest globally, so a local stream pays less than one in a wealthier market. Local listening grew by 206 percent year-on-year in 2024, and TechCabal's analysis found that this growth pulls the average payout per stream down.
A listener who plays a song a hundred times in a year therefore generates roughly about ₦200 in royalties, before labels and distributors take their share. That figure invites the conclusion that one listener's streaming barely matters, and two things complicate it. TechCabal notes that Nigerian artists increasingly use streaming as a discovery engine, converting streams into touring and brand deals. Streams feed the fame that sets the price of a ticket and a sponsorship, so they count for more than their naira value. The ₦60 billion is also the sum of 30.3 billion individual plays. Each listener's share is small, which holds for any act done by many people at once, and the size of one share has never settled whether the whole is worth joining.
The people who book live events are promoters, brands and organisers. Reports on the industry do not say how much of that income comes from political events, so the share is unknown, and the listener's leverage depends on it. Many leading artists are also signed to international touring companies, so for some of them the larger income may come from outside the local audience. The ethical question remains, since attention and credibility carry value of their own. "Am I funding them?" becomes "What am I helping them look like, and what does my attendance add?”
Music and political power in this part of the world have been linked for a very long time. In Mande societies, griots were attached to ruling courts as advisors to kings and warriors, and a system of patronage continues in the region today. They performed praise songs for the families who paid them. A piece in This Is Africa notes that music and politics in Nigeria have had a symbiotic relationship even through the military years. The Guardian Nigeria has reported that politicians increasingly use artistes in campaigns, for image building and for attacks on opponents, and that some artists fear losing fans if they are seen as partisan.
Performers have always worked for people with money, and people with money have often held power. Two readings of a political appearance are available. One treats it as a job, a professional hired to perform. The other treats it as endorsement, since the performance lends the host an audience's goodwill. A practice being old settles nothing about whether it is right, and the history of patronage includes artists praising the people who paid them. The job reading explains why the artist said yes. The endorsement reading describes what the audience receives. One appearance can be both, and the audience experiences the second whatever the artist intended. Audiences also tend to choose the reading that fits what they already thought of the artist.
The mirror image of this question has been argued loudly especially in Nigerian entertainment media: whether fans have the right to demand activism from the artists they follow. In moments of economic hardship, some audiences have asked musicians to speak about conditions that affect everyone, and have called out artists who keep friendly relationships with political elites.
There are good reasons to want artists to speak. They have platforms ordinary people lack, and their words reach audiences the press does not. Art that reflects the period it was made in leaves a record of what people lived through.
There are good reasons to resist the demand as well. Speaking has costs, among them lost bookings and, in some cases, backlash from authorities. Artists have bills to pay, and the people who control the money in the industry are not always the people an artist would choose to please.
Those costs fall unevenly, and the unevenness cuts both ways. An artist with a large platform and secure income has the most room to speak and the least cover for silence, so the demand lands hardest on the people best able to meet it. Artists with smaller platforms who depend on local bookings carry more risk, and maybe the audience owes them more patience.
Intentionality is harder to measure. An artist who speaks because the cause matters to them and an artist who speaks because the audience expects it can say the same words, and the audience cannot see the difference. Fans also sometimes ask for an artist's politics when it matches their own and ask the artist to stay out of politics when it does not. That inconsistency says something about the audience, and it leaves open whether the demand itself is fair. Both can be true at once: fans can be inconsistent and the demand can still be legitimate.
Between full separation and full boycott there is a range of choices, and each carries a different weight. You can keep listening privately and direct your money toward causes you prefer. You can put your decisions where more money moves: which shows you attend, which brands you buy from, whose events you give your presence to. You can keep the music and say publicly what you disagree with. You can step away from one artist's catalogue and accept the loss, knowing you may return when your view of the person shifts. You can also give your attention and money to artists whose work and conduct you already admire.
Individual choices carry limited weight on their own. Promoters, sponsors and organizers can respond when audience reaction arrives in numbers, so collective action through attendance, public comment and the brands people choose to patronize can shift what gets booked. Individual decisions also deserve a self-check: would I apply this same standard to an artist whose politics I share? Loyalty to a party, a region or a language group can pass for principle, and the test is whether the standard survives when it applies to someone I like.
I make things other people read, and I know the work will be placed next to what I say and do elsewhere. Anyone who publishes accepts that. The only part of the process I control fully is the work. Craft is what an artist can improve, argue for and defend, and the person making it gets read into it whether the artist wants that or not.
That gives artists something to think about too. An artist who takes bookings from sources they know their audience dislikes can say so plainly, and an artist who changes their mind can say that as well. Audiences tend to forgive honesty more readily than the appearance of hiding something. An artist who wants their work judged on its merits has a stronger case when they have been straightforward about the rest.
I want to keep the music. The songs I love did things for me that the biography of the person who made them cannot undo, and I think the first question, whether the work still means something, can be answered yes without apology. On political disagreement I keep the music and decide separately about my money, my attendance and my public praise, which carry more weight at a ticket counter than on a streaming app. Harm to people moves the line, and I accept that it can and likely will cost me songs.
I also think artists and audiences would both be better served by saying where the money comes from. When an artist is paid to appear somewhere, the audience can handle knowing that. The tangled feeling we get when a favourite song comes on and we know what we know comes partly from the sense that nobody is being straight about who is paying for what.
