Just like music from outside of Western Africa nations, music from this region is made up of a variety and of different types. And just like music from the rest of the world, music from Western African countries is mainly made up two major categories, traditional western African music and what can be referred to as contemporary or modern western African styles.

Compared, the contemporary African Music styles have had more popularity than the traditional one’s. At least this is what a non West Africa can observe about the regions past and present musical trends. In other words as the West African nations have developed, so has their recording industry and so on. It is fair to say that the music industry in Western African countries is at par with other parts of Africa.

Additionally it also fair to allude that the movie industry in West Africa especially in Nigeria has flourished greatly compared to most other African nations. The question that one can ask would be, could the “Nigerian Hollywood” make the music the entire region’s music industry explode with higher artist record sales around in around Africa and the world in addition to heightening of musical standards in this region?

This is a fair question to ask about any developing nation’s music or movie industry and some debate is encouraged here. As India’s Bollywood has continued to blossom and record high record sales revenue worldwide, so has Indian music. The two industries have historically developed hand in hand. With that said, one can assume that the popularity of Nigerian drama or action movies is likely to spawn budding musical artists from the region. We are however yet to see this kind of development in West Africa.

Hip hop can be said to have helped churn out great artists from the region especially again from Nigeria.  Other nations in West Africa are yet to show their music prowess; in fact one of the common complaints that have been made about artists in this region is that they’ve been trying to copy successful Nigerian artists. These complaints have been especially so in countries such as Ghana where analysts write to complain that Ghanaian musicians have demonstrated a luck of musical creativity and have ended up copying their English speaking country counterparts.

Well, copying musical, theatric, movie or any other stylistic device is not necessarily a bad thing as long as, in my opinion, the final product is embellished with original local artistic value. Hip hop culture has been copied all over the world, yet Run DMC’s belly is not aching, in fact, it has only made his rap pioneering records sell even more residually.

In conclusion, influence of one successful industry in a nation or a region , in this case the West African movie industry led by Nigerian, can and will have a positive effect on the entire regions music industry. Additionally, if other countries’ musicians want to sound like top Nigerian Artists in order to sell records, in my book, as long as they are not infringing the formers copyrights, so be it. It is for the good and the great of the entire West African region’s music recording industry in the long run. This has been demonstrated in other parts of the world and I see no conceivable reason as to why it wouldn’t materialize itself in West Africa. I think we haven’t seen everything yet from this region. More is on the way.

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