Nigeria’s creative industries are among its most globally visible exports, and among its most poorly documented. A film gets made on a handshake and a shared drive. A song generates revenue across four platforms with no written split. A brand collaboration runs for two years before anyone asks who owns the artwork. The work is world-class; the paperwork behind it frequently is not.
The sector is also increasingly complex. A film may involve producers, writers, performers, financiers and international distributors across several jurisdictions. A song generates revenue through recordings, publishing, performances, licensing and digital platforms simultaneously. A creator operates at once as a talent, brand, publisher and media business. What connects all of them is the need to know what is actually owned, who controls it, what has already been licensed and on what terms.
That gap becomes expensive at exactly the moment it matters most. When a distributor acquires territorial rights, when an investor finances a catalogue, when a streaming platform requires warranties of ownership, when a financier asks what security it is taking. The question is always the same: can you prove the chain of title? Under Nigeria’s Copyright Act, assignments of copyright and exclusive licences must be in writing, which makes the underlying documentation commercially decisive rather than merely administrative. Where it does not exist, the deal either shrinks or dies.
We work with creators, production companies, labels, publishers, studios, agencies, platforms, gaming businesses and the investors financing them. Our work usually begins with ownership: identifying the relevant rights, documenting contributions and assignments, and establishing what has already been licensed away. From there it extends into commercialisation, distribution and platform agreements, licensing and synchronisation arrangements, publishing and royalty structures, talent and collaboration contracts, brand partnerships and merchandising. Distribution agreements determine where content travels. Royalty structures determine how value is shared. Corporate structures determine where rights sit and how investment enters the business.
Technology is now changing the sector faster than the contracts drafted to govern it. Digital distribution has made global reach routine while making rights administration considerably harder. Generative AI raises questions the industry has barely begun to answer: what a model may lawfully train on, who owns synthetic output, whether a voice or a likeness can be reproduced without consent, and how any of it is policed. Some of those questions remain legally unsettled, which makes contractual allocation, consent and platform-risk assessment more important rather than less. Creators and rights holders are being asked to sign platform terms and AI licensing arrangements whose implications are not obvious on the page, and often not intended to be.
Alongside this sits the business layer. As creators, studios and production companies grow, they need formal corporate structures, governance, financing arrangements, investment documentation and systems capable of supporting valuable intellectual-property portfolios. We help build that commercial infrastructure around creative work.