MBW’s Inspiring Women series profiles female executives who have risen through the ranks of the business, highlighting their career journey – from their professional breakthrough to the senior responsibilities they now fulfill. Inspiring Women is supported by Virgin Music Group.
Ronami Ogulu, co-manager of Burna Boy and COO of his Spaceship Collective, has been instrumental in a number of landmark career highs for the Nigerian artist.
Since joining the team in 2018, she’s helped score the first Grammy win for an Afrobeats artist for a solo project (for 2020’s Twice as Tall), a global sold-out stadium tour (including a stop at New York’s Madison Square Garden), and a UK No.1 album, I Told Them…
Ogulu has also been involved in the crossover success of Burna Boy by facilitating collaborations with a string of artists including Ed Sheeran, Sam Smith, Stormzy, Chris Martin, 21 Savage and Travis Scott.
Alongside her professional job titles, Ronami has a more personal role: sister. She completes a family management team with the siblings’ mother, Bose Ogulu.
Ronami hasn’t been part of the full-time team from the onset of Burna’s career, choosing instead to pursue a career in finance initially. Her last job outside of music was as a finance associate, where she was involved in trying to increase the income of farmers in Africa.
After helping her mom and brother on the side, mainly as a stylist, she was asked if she’d officially come on board in 2018. It was a no-brainer for Ronami, whose family culture is steeped in music.
She says: “My grandfather used to manage Fela Kuti, helped him start his band and set up his system. I was seeing my mom doing a similar thing with my brother. I could see that it was just one person trying to move all these different parts around and a lot of things were falling through the cracks.
“I had to look at it in a simple way of, ‘Are you going to pursue this thing with this company where you don’t even know what the end goal is, or are you going to do it for your family?’” The decision was naturally made easier because Bose was able to match Ronami’s salary at the time.
Burna Boy’s first US tour was Ronami’s baptism by fire, which she describes as a steep learning curve that taught her the importance of being surrounded by good people who were willing to get stuck in.
“The right people can change the trajectory of how a day goes,” she says. “Everybody had to do five different jobs and everybody did it happily because they saw the bigger picture. The right team can make or break your company or, in this case, your talent.”
2019’s African Giant was the first album campaign and tour that Ronami was involved in conceptualizing. Four more albums have been released since, the last three of which have reached the Top 10 in the U.K.
Currently, Ronami is working on the recent launch of Spaceship Films, scaling the company’s talent management arm, and the ongoing campaign for July’s No Sign of Weakness.
Here, we chat to her about working with family, ambitions for Spaceship Collective, lessons learned across her career, and much more besides…
Tell me about your childhood. How big of a role did music play for you and your siblings?
I was born in Nigeria, in a city called Port Harcourt. My childhood was amazing. We were always busy. I did ballet for about nine years. Burna did karate, my little sister did all of the above. We used to go to the South of France or different countries in Francophone Africa every summer because my mom was trained as a translator and worked for institutions that needed that service. We would go to summer camps while she was working. That trained a knack for languages.
Our family was super close. We used to call ourselves the famous five. Now I can see the benefit of that dynamic — the communication doesn’t need to be rehearsed or strategized, it’s something that we do without any grapple. I feel like everything happens for a reason, and a lot of what we’ve been able to achieve we probably wouldn’t have if we didn’t have our kind of background.
For example, we went to boarding school in Lagos, which is where my grandparents lived, so we used to go to them for half-term. My grandpa has this massive archive of music, which is how Burna started, listening to the deep cuts of highlife and jùjú music, funk, soul and rap. That’s what informed his Afro-fusion.
It seems like your parents encouraged you to pursue creative endeavours, even though music can seem like an unstable career choice…
For sure. It wasn’t easy for them when my brother said he didn’t want to finish university after his second year. At the time, they were having to pay international school fees, so they had to make a decision. When he did get back to Nigeria, he was put on a very strict schedule and given very strict instructions, like, ‘You’re going to get a job and you’re going to wake up and show up to work every day’ and ‘You’re going to try this music out. Then, after a year, if we can’t see that it makes sense, we’re going to have to go back and discuss what your plans are.’
“My mom always says that BURNA didn’t really have a plan b which was why there was so much emphasis on her being involved in the day-to-day.”
My mom always says that he didn’t really have a Plan B, which was why there was so much emphasis on her being involved in the day-to-day. They’re super big on everybody being able to have options and have a fallback plan. A lot of the initial involvement in his career was specifically based on the fact that there needed to be a Plan B created, should anything go wrong. Thankfully, we’re where we are now.
What are your ultimate ambitions for Spaceship Collective?
Our ultimate goal is to have a number of verticals that are running concurrently, where we’re able to hone talent and create entities out of an individual who came to us with one skill or one talent. Over the course of however long it is, how can I take what you have and work with you to make you an entity that’s across [different areas]? Say you know how to sing, but you can also act, how do we help you transition to that, put you in the right rooms and connect you with the right people?
Also, how are we able to contribute to building infrastructure in Africa for the arts, for the creative sector, and for the creative economy? When you think about the sheer amount of talent that is on this continent, versus the level of infrastructure, it’s pretty sad.
We want to contribute to creating systems that allow talented people to succeed outside of the traditional career paths. If there was infrastructure, a lot of people would have made a way for themselves a lot quicker.
What makes a good music manager?
It’s important to be able to put yourself in as many people’s shoes as possible in real time and to be able to make decisions based on a strong instinct and a strong belief in your talent.
A lot of the issues that we had in the beginning in dealing with different staff members in labels or agencies was down to the fact that I was extremely worried about how each person was selling my artists at different points in time. I genuinely felt like you cannot sell what you don’t understand or what you don’t believe in. A lot of the time, I think people gloss over that. Whether or not you have a popping song on radio, that sort of heat isn’t in perpetuity.
There’s a certain level of flexibility as a manager you need to have, where you’re able to speak languages across the different parts of the ecosystem in the business. If you have no idea how to speak in digital lingo, or you have nobody on your team who understands it, you’re at a disadvantage, and so is your talent. If you don’t know how to navigate through the tour business, or all the different parts of the music ecosystem, the entertainment ecosystem, or sports, you’re going to put your talent at a big disadvantage. The ability to wear any pair of shoes and kick ass while you do it is the difference.
We’ve been in situations where I’ve had to figure out things I never dreamed I would have to deal with. But the fact that you’re the driver of somebody’s career and someone’s livelihood, puts your mind in a different setting. Also, do you have myopia? A good music manager cannot be myopic. There has to be a long game at all times.
You work closely with your mom and brother. How do you maintain healthy family relationships while also working together in a business setting?
Some days are easier than others, to be honest. But understanding that above all else, there’s unconditional love, no matter what, is really the be-all and end-all. My mom’s like, if none of my kids are doing well, I would have to pay for all of their lives, so it’s in my interest to look out for everyone, not just because you’re my children, but on a very holistic level of I want to see you succeed.
![Burna Boy - Last Last [Official Music Video]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/421w1j87fEM/hqdefault.jpg)
Us being able to understand that no matter what, whether anybody is famous or not, whether you’re a doctor or a lawyer, you’re still going to come back to this circle. Even when we have massive fights and big arguments, the next day, you have to be able to get over it. A lot of what keeps causing problems in family dynamics is that everybody wants to be right, everybody wants to talk. For us, learning how to argue, to communicate, as opposed to arguing to be right, has changed everything.
do African creatives and industry professionals receive the respect they deserve in global music spaces?
Both outside [Africa] and inside, to be honest, I think it’s one and the same. We’ve definitely come a long way but there’s still a ways to go. It might take a while, but the world will catch on. There’s so much talent from Africa.
If you look at the number of humans across all of the 52 countries, if all those people had buying power, had access to data, and we had good leaders who were working towards a better future, there would be no stopping us. There’s the handicap of where you’re from and the handicap of how far you can go without the help of good infrastructure or somebody else. As we conquer each hurdle, we’re changing the narrative bit by bit.
What’s the best career advice you’ve received?
My grandfather gives the best advice in general, and it wasn’t career-specific, but he always told all of us, ‘There’s absolutely nothing you cannot do. If you think about it, you can execute it’. For a lot of people, execution is always a problem. If you’re able to strategically put together an execution plan, there is nothing you can’t achieve.
“Walking around with the mindset that every idea you have can be executed with a bit of commitment changes your perspective on life in general.”
Walking around with the mindset that every idea you have can be executed with a bit of commitment changes your perspective on life in general, how far you feel like you’re able to go and what rooms you’re able to flourish in.
What’s the most exciting development in today’s music business?
I just completed a course at Harvard, and one of the classes was about AI. I’m super interested in seeing how AI impacts the music business in the future and in a way that profits creatives, as opposed to making the industry feel like they’re being stolen from. I definitely think there’s a way for that. As a society, we need to embrace technology.
There was a time when we had to walk around with tapes, cassettes and a big Walkman device and look at us now. We’ve recently started incorporating AI into our touring business.
How have you incorporated it into touring?
With mapping out routing. When we get offers from the different channels and agents, we’re able to put it all down and create a routing plan that’s cost-efficient, effective and that gets you there on time, especially when you’re moving with a crew of 46 people and your suppliers are in different parts of Europe. We used it on the US tour at the end of the year. It helps with managing costs and managing how people move around.
If you could change one thing about the music industry, what would it be?
The gatekeeping. There’s a lot of gatekeeping at different stages and at different levels. And the bigger you get, the more you see. With every label, for example, it’s a business. So the top earners kind of float the company, but in turn, that means that everybody else gets a minuscule budget, which doesn’t necessarily give you the right avenue to succeed in a time where the world is inundated with new releases, the majority of which get zero streams.
“there needs to be more openness and visibility over things like budgeting and whether there is a fair distribution between who gets what share of their masters and after how many years.”
Thankfully, there are apps now that allow you to engage directly with your fans and cut the middleman out, which is great for a lot of creatives. But there needs to be more openness and visibility over things like budgeting and whether there is a fair distribution between who gets what share of their masters and after how many years.
A lot of managers don’t really know when it’s a good time to say, ‘Okay, I’m going to let you keep this for X amount of years, because it’s better in your custody and then at that point, there needs to be a clause that brings it back to my talent’.
Figuring out fairness in business and the general concept of fair play is something that I would change, for sure; and tearing down the wall that divides you from even understanding what fair play should look like.
What advice would you give to emerging creatives in Nigeria and across Africa?
Consistency is key. I would rather you be overprepared than underprepared. If you’re thinking about being a musician, the first thing I would ask is, How many songs have you actually recorded? And out of those songs you’ve recorded, how many would you put out for people to hear? If you were a consumer, how many songs out of those would you download?
Be consistent in whatever it is you want to do, whatever it is you’re chasing, or whatever your dream is. If you’re an athlete, keep training. If you’re aspiring to go into the NBA Draft at some point, keep working hard, keep showing up, because on the day that is your day, you need to be prepared.
Virgin Music Group is the global independent music division of Universal Music Group, which brings together UMG’s label and artist service businesses including Virgin and Ingrooves.
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