EOTW: Kilo Jalloh & Moe Bah

‘Terminator’ is undoubtedly one of the best songs of 2023. It has millions of impressions on social media and is constantly blasting on the airwaves. This success has also been evident on the charts, as the song currently holds a spot in the top ten of the Official Nigeria Top 100.

The song has risen steadily on the charts, debuting at No. 17 and making its way up to the 7th spot. It also has over 4 million streams on Spotify.

The success of the song can be attributed to King Promise and his label, 5k Records. In this week’s edition of EOTW, we have a conversation with Kilo and Moe, two of the founders of 5k Records (alongside super producer Jae5). We discussed the process behind the creation of ‘Terminator’, the marketing strategies employed, and what to expect from the label going forward.

TTC: Kindly introduce yourselves so we may get to know you.

Moe: My name is Moe. I am from London, and I am also a co-founder of 2k Management and co-President of 5k Records.

Kilo: I’m Kilo, co-founder of 2k Management as well as co-President of 5k Records.

TTC: Your clients' list is quite impressive. On the record label at 5k, you have the likes of King Promise and Libianca and on the 2k management side, JHus and JAE5. They have each achieved a level of success in the Nigerian market in recent times, how have you been able to achieve this?

Moe: A major thing to note is that even though Kilo and I are from the UK, our parents are from Sierra Leone. So for us, we have a deep connection with our roots. We are fans of music and in particular afrobeats, which comes natural to us. Jae5 is Ghanaian, King Promise is Ghanaian, and Libianca is Cameroonian, and it makes the most sense to build a strategy around them that includes their core and push their countries of origin. We are strong believers in having love from where you’re from first before anywhere else. Africa is the most important region, as it means a lot to us. Even for other songs that we release, we spend time thinking of how to break in places like Nigeria and Ghana etc as much as we do the UK. 

Kilo: I would say Afrobeats is probably our favourite genre. We heard it while growing up at home and African home parties. I think we are very much a part of the diaspora that embraced the culture. As I got older, I realized a lot of the songs we liked listening to were from other West African countries. All our successful music has been heavily Afrobeats influenced and so it’s no surprise that it resonates back home.

TTC: Recently, your clients have touched base in Nigeria by collaborating with talents like BNXN, Omah Lay, Young John, and Naira Marley. Is this a deliberate strategy?

Kilo: I would say it’s more because we’re fans of the music they put out than an actual strategy. I think I was in Buju’s Top 1% of listeners on Spotify wrapped; I’m a big fan of his music, and it’s the same with Omah Lay. We have been listening to Omah Lay since the Get Layd project. I don’t think we’ve collaborated with an artist we don’t know or don’t listen to. Our come up has been A&R driven and focused, so it’s finding the right people to jump on the right songs. With Libanca’s ‘People’, the message in the song is about being in a bad place, and we felt the synergies with a lot of what Omah Lay was singing about. To us, it just made sense for him to be on the remix with the super talented Ayra Starr.

TTC: You both are executives of the week due to your contribution to the success of King Promise’s Terminator, can you take us through the process of creating the sound and working towards its success?

Moe: The track was produced by Kiilbeatz in Ghana. It’s a different type of sound from the usual King Promise stuff we’ve released. This was more of an upbeat vibe, something people could dance to. King Promise is a complete artist with a great management team. He pushed this record, working non-stop promoting the dance across socials and what we are seeing in terms of world-wide creations across Snapchat, Instagram and Tiktok has been phenomenal. The track will be on repeat for the rest of the year. It’s sitting on over 40million streams (including boomplay and audiomack) globally and we credit this to the ground work done in Nigeria with support from The Plug whom we collaborated with for this particular record. The truth is though, the more you hear ‘Terminator’, the more you love it.

 

Kilo: What Moe said is right, everybody knows King Promise as a sweet lover Boy, but this song was a step in a different direction. When I first heard it, I liked it. We have an artist putting his all into a song he believes and all we can just do in those circumstances is back them up. I like to think that it’s because of their intuition sometimes, and that was the case with King Promise. We started working on it along his Nigerian team and right now, it’s slowly making its way into the UK music streams. We are talking about maybe doing another remix to help it crossover in the UK and other territories.

TTC: J Hus has a new album out and “Who told you” hit No 21 on the Official Nigeria Top 100 charts, did you expect that level of success here in Nigeria?

Kilo: J Hus is a rapper but personally, I prefer when he dabbles into Afrobeats, which makes the fun up-tempo J Hus that everyone likes. His “Big Conspiracy” album had a lot of conscious rap with lyrics that you can only resonate with if you’re in a certain mood, while this new album was just up-tempo, happy J Hus. He had this party vibe we decided to exploit by having a collab with Drake. We knew he had a fanbase in Nigeria… but the fact the DSP landscape has expanded since (Big Conspiracy), I guess we were able to really track it.

Moe: When we heard the J Hus and Drake collab, we knew it was a club anthem and everyone we played it to, was on the same page. Our team at Sony in Nigeria did early playbacks of the album Beautiful And Brutal Yard (BABY), way before it came out and the feedback was ‘Who Told You’ and ‘Militerian’ ft Naira Marley stood out, but to see the album resonate has been amazing.

TTC: What can we expect from your talents in the second half of 2023

Moe: We have had a very good first half of the year signing ‘People’ by Libianca to 5k Records in December 2022. We are half way through the year and to date have achieved over half a billion streams. The video is approaching 200 million views. We are proud that she was nominated and won a BET Award, gone on the road with Alicia Keys in the US, broke the record for having the highest charting afrobeats record (no.2) by a female artist in the UK and completely dominated in new markets for us like India. This second half, expect consistency across the roster and a lot more music. I think sometimes it’s hard to keep putting music out because you want to make sure you get the right record but for us it’s about consistency across the board.

Kilo: Like Moe said, a lot more consistent music and because we’re in the middle of summer now, we might focus more on up-tempo music. We’ve got a lot of artistes’ next releases in, we got some collaborations coming and also looking at real talent as well and it’s exciting.