A High Court in Lagos has ruled that the artist formerly known as DJ Zeez breached his contract with HF Music (his former record label) and has ordered the singer to cough up a whopping N22.3m. Whopping/whooping cough, see what I did there?
Never mind.
Zeez was actually ordered to pay N22,378,605.70 (Twenty-Two Million, Three Hundred and Seventy-Eight Thousand, Six Hundred and Five Naira and Seventy Kobo) to be exact, being the –
Total amount spent by HF Music through various advances made to and on his behalf, from the commencement date of his contract with the label until the point when it was breached by him.
HF Music vs Zeez – Court ruling
The judgment mentions advances but says nothing about what was recouped. What this means is that, if Zeez’ contract started when he was unveiled officially (April, 2014) and the lawsuit was first filed in June 2015, his account at the label had a burn rate of around N1.6m per month. Costly but defendable, Zeez has been quite active with song after song, video after video, promo after promo. However, I’d have to assume HF presented receipts and documents where Zeez attested to those expenses when they were being made. I’d also have to assume that Zeez’ projects over that period were entirely funded by HF and there wasn’t some joint venture agreement or partnership between them on how to source for funding. If my assumptions are accurate, then this figure is not only defendable, it becomes quite realistic.
Zeez’ HF Music Career
It’s not clear how exactly Zeez breached his contract but according to reports, which are admittedly one-sided, cracks in the relationship between artist and label began manifesting when Zeez was putting finishing touches to his self-titled EP, his first full body of work on the label. For some reason, it was difficult to get the singer into the studio to finish up the project and have it released. When the EP did get released in November 2014, it was then more difficult to get people to listen to the singer, which in turn made it difficult for the label to recoup some of that money in the short term.
Now let’s take a closer look at one source of inflow – streams. On Sound Cloud, Zeez the EP has been streamed almost 23,000 times. More than half of those streams are for the Olamide-assisted single “Atewo” which the label promoted like it was the Mayweather vs. Pacquiao fight but very likely didn’t see Mayweather vs. Pacquiao revenues.
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The EP is also available on Spinlet, Spotify and other platforms with a subscriber payment option, but please you’ll allow me make a couple of assumptions here. Let’s apply Spotify’s infamous pay-per stream arithmetic to Zeez’ numbers to get a sense of how underwhelming they truly are. As a best case scenario, Spotify says it pays content right owners up to $0.006 per stream, that would mean that if Zeez had put up similar numbers on Spotify, the label and the singer would have had to share a princely sum of $138. Streaming revenues are important because the EP was largely a digital release but there are other revenue streams from sales that we overlookeed deliberately. If Zeez and the label couldn’t convince listeners to listen when all they had to part with was 3+ minutes of their time and a few KB’s of their data, would you expect them to exchange significant Naira or Dollar amounts for the same music?
I guess it’s therefore safe to say that Zeez’ touring revenue was more interesting to the company or at least interesting enough for the company to send letters to promoters in Houston informing them of a court case against Zeez and discouraging them from booking him. This is presumably because there was no way HF could track its money when its relationship with the singer had broken down. However, without a real hit song to perform in 8 years, how much of that reported monthly burn did Zeez’ touring revenue realistically offset?
The lawsuit was filed in June, 2015, HF Music only confirmed the news to the media in September. It could be that the two parties tried to reach an amicable settlement to avoid going through with court proceedings but none was reached, so the label pressed on and went public. Interestingly, Zeez has been quiet about the case so far, allowing HF to control the narrative. Personally though, I’m shocked at the speed at which the court heard all the evidence, presided over the case and pronounced judgment. I expected a few years rather than a few months.
Zeez – 4kasibe
Zeez can appeal the judgement but for a singer who has already been fighting hard to return to the career heights of 08’s “4Kasibe” and “Bobbee United”, this ruling could pause such plans, if not kill them entirely. It wouldn’t surprise me if this is HF’s real motive because, I’m not Zeez’ savings account manager, but I shudder to think how many years of direct debits it would take for him to clear this gbese, if at all he can.
HF Music vs Zeez could be a landmark case for the music industry – it could put the fear of god in Zeez’ former label mates and respect for the rule of law in the rest of his colleagues, who might have thought breaching their recording contracts was a good idea.