Something exciting is happening and shifting in Ugandan music, and I don’t think we’re talking about it enough.
For the longest time, the producer’s lane was clear: cook up the beat, hand it over, disappear into the credits. The artiste took the stage, the label took the strategy, and the producer took… whatever cut was negotiated, if it was negotiated at all or their one off pay for production. But that lane is getting crowded now, because more and more producers are stepping out from behind the boards and putting their own names on the record.
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Look at what’s happened just in the last few months or so. “TOMA” by Nessim and Vyroota didn’t just do numbers, it made a statement, peaking at number 4 on the Apple Music Top 100 chart of Uganda and surpassing 875,000 plus Spotify streams and 3,500,000 views for its official music video on YouTube. “LOCO” by Deejay Harold, featuring Rema Namakula and Nigeria’s Chike, was among the pioneer releases leading this trail. Bringing it closer to the region, Element Eleeh, brought the trend fully into East Africa’s bloodstream, is riding high off “AYAYAYA”, featuring Joshua Baraka and Kenya’s Bien, which is doing amazing on its own merit, not as a footnote to whoever’s verse is on it.
This isn’t even new energy, if we’re being honest. We’ve watched DJs experiment with full projects before: Deejay LL teaming up with Beenie Gunter on “Commando”, DJ Slick Stuart and DJ Roja on a whole album “Very Wellooo”; DJ Bryan and Selector Jay each linking with Magnom for Last year, Denim Cartel dropped “Cartel Bizness” EP , built with producer studio sessions and dropping “Kampala Whine” and “Formula”. Producers are now doing the same. Axon together with Denim Cartel and pulling in Elijah Kitaka, Bensoul, A Pass, Mike Kayihura and Big Tril across the track list. What’s changed now is that this is graduating from novelty to strategy.
And it’s not just DJs stretching into artistry, it’s producers doing it with real intent. Nessim’s “Terms and Conditions”, featuring Ava Peace and Elijah Kitaka, is a good example. That’s not a producer sneaking onto someone else’s song, that’s a producer commissioning a record, curating the features, and owning the release. That’s label behavior. Still on this conversation, John Blaq’s long term producer Kelly Yo hit the road running, and recently dropped “Tulo Tulo” on which he features Ava Peace & John Blaq.
Which brings me to the real question: if producers can now write the brief, pick the collaborators, and drop the record without waiting on a label’s calendar, where does that leave the record label?
The gatekeeper problem
Labels have always sold themselves on access: to studios, to distribution, to marketing budgets, and artists\ ear. But a producer who can build a song from scratch, feature the right voices, and push it out independently has quietly removed most of those barriers for themselves. The one thing they’re still missing, often, is leverage over their own work once it leaves their hands.
That gap showed up loudly on Nigerian Twitter recently, in the back-and-forth around Fave, Ucee, and Odumodublvck. Fave went on a podcast joking about wanting to hear the song after a producer reportedly gave Odu a beat that was originally hers. The producer at the centre of it didn’t hold back, firing back that ownership claims only show up once someone else finds value in what was left sitting for two years with no payment, no agreement, and no release. His point was simple: recording on a beat doesn’t transfer ownership of it, and a producer isn’t a storage facility for work nobody bothered to finish paying for.
One Twitter (X) user summed up why this keeps happening, remarking: “Producers create the music but rarely control what happens to it afterward. You make the beat, send it off, and then you wait, sometimes for months, on someone else’s decision to release.” His prescription was direct, producers need to build leverage outside of just making beats, through producer-led records, instrumentals, tapes and collaborations, and most importantly, by owning their own publishing, masters, royalties and credits instead of treating every beat as a one-off transaction.
This isn’t a foreign concept globally, either. Metro Boomin, Mustard, and DJ Khaled have built entire careers on being more than beatmakers. Hit-Boy, Pheelz, Mastercraft and Sarz have followed suit. Sarz especially has receipts, from “I Love Girls With Trobul”, his joint EP with WurlD, “LV N ATTN (2021)” a collaborative EP featuring Lojay, “Sweetness” (2021): a collaborative project with Obongjayarto “The Game Needs Us”, his recent project with BNXN, while Pheelz and Fireboy DML’s joint EP “Peace by Piece” showed what happens when a producer becomes a co-lead rather than a hired hand.
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So, should labels be signing producers?
I’d argue yes, and not out of fear, but out of foresight. A producer who can already write the brief, pull the features, and drop a project with an audience attached isn’t competition to a label, they’re a label’s dream signing. The alternative is watching that same producer build the infrastructure themselves, quietly, until the day they don’t need a label at all.
Uganda’s producers are already proving they can be more than the engine room. The question isn’t whether this trend continues. It’s whether the labels move first, or watch it happen from the outside looking in.