Asake and Fireboy DML are two of the hottest musical acts to ever come out from YBNL Nation, a record label owned by Olamide. Now, Asake and Fireboy have decided to leak the private information of how they actually got Olamide to notice and sign them into YBNL Nation.
Both of these artistes didn’t hold back, as they bared it all so that upcoming musicians like you can capitalize on it to arrest the attention of Olamide Badoo himself.
Asake
Asake took the music industry by storm with his breakthrough song “Omo Ope,” which featured Olamide. You wouldn’t believe that Asake didn’t create that song after he was signed to YBNL. He had created it way back while in obscurity, but he had no money to promote it.
And if Olamide had not noticed him at the nick of time, that beautiful Afrobeat music would’ve gone into the abyss of oblivion. Never to be heard, never to be played, and never to be enjoyed.
Exposing how he got Olamide to notice and sign him, Asake said that he has been texting Olamide on Instagram since 2020, desperately pleading with him to sign him just as he signed his schoolmates, Fireboy and Chinko Ekun.
Chinko Ekun, Fireboy, and Asake all attended the same university together, recorded music together, and believed that one day the world would hear their songs.
All of a sudden, Chinko Ekun got signed to YBNL.
Fireboy followed soon after.
Hoping that he’d be next, he heard nothing from Olamide despite sending his music to his DM numerous times with desperate pleadings.
The first year after Olalmide signed Fireboy, Asake kept bombarding the DM of the YBNL boss. Instead of a response, guess what he got?
Crickets.
Entering into the second year, he was already beginning to lose zeal with his annoying beggings. So, he decided to drop his new song “Omo Ope” and just posted it on his Instagram page, hoping for the best and resigning himself to fate.
Asake decided to hit Olamide’s DM for one more round of begging, after seeing how his song got nowhere. Nobody was listening to this amazing jam. No promotions from anywhere. The label he had been with for four years, according to him, completely wasted his time as they failed to fulfill any of the promises they made to him.
Sinking his head in despair, it dawned on Asake that he was going to die with his musical gifts. And there would be no Nigerian fan to remember his name. How painful it was to have so much talent locked up inside, yet no one wanted to hear it.
All because they looked down on upcoming musicians like him.
Going to bed with the sting of reality biting hard, he remembered how his original passion was to be a dancer. And he actually danced as part of a local musical group. However, poverty made him consider a career in music. And now, this music wasn’t paying. His hustle kept failing to bring in money, again and again.
Nothing was working.
He slept with a heavy heart and woke up feeling groggy the next morning. Going through his daily routine in a haze of absent-mindedness, he decided to check how his new song, “Omo Ope” was doing on Instagram.
The likes on the song weren’t encouraging. People didn’t want to listen. Family members deliberately scrolled past his posts on music. His eyes were drawn to a lone message notification in his Instagram DM.
Opening his DM, the message he saw caused time to momentarily stop. For the length of 1.9 seconds, his heart didn’t beat.
There it was.
A message from Olamide Badoo stating that they both needed to see each other. He quickly replied that he was coming.
READ ALSO: “I Chose To Go By My Mother’s Name As My Stage Name For This Reason,” Asake Opens Up
Running inside his room, Asake tried out his different clothes as he asked himself, “Will Olamide like this shirt?”
“What about this one?”
Finally, he picked one outfit and rushed down to Olamide’s residence. As Asake recalled the meeting, he said in an interview that Olamide asked him, “How are you, Asake?”
“Fine sir,” he replied nervously.
And then the big question dropped.
“Would you like to join the family, would you like to join YBNL?” Badoo asked.
Looking at those words rolling from the lips of Olamide like it was nothing, Asake couldn’t believe he was even asked that question.
For a street boy who came from nothing, that was a no-brainer.
“Yes, I’m ready to join right now.”
Peering at the young lad closely, Olamide asked him to go home and read the contract he was handing over to him carefully.
“I don’t want to go home, sir. I don’t want to read anything. I’m tired of everything, just sign me,” Asake pleaded passionately as if Olamide would change his mind the next minute.
Before you know it, his music contract was sealed with YBNL, and Olamide had him redo “Omo Ope” so he could also feature in it.
Asake gladly recorded Omo Ope again in the YBNL studio, gave Olamide a verse so he could drop his iconic street rap, and voila! The song blew open with such force across Nigeria, penetrating every neighborhood speaker and becoming an instant street anthem. Watch it here:
After staying in YBNL for a while, Asake got to know that Olamide had been reading his messages all along and monitoring his social media page for consistency.
Asake also revealed that Olamide knew when he originally dropped “Omo Ope,” and when he heard it, he decided to send Asake a message for the first time to come over.
Fireboy DML
Fireboy DML is no stranger when it comes to making music. Originally a brilliant bookworm in school, he could no longer deny the naughty pull to pursue music, as he was constantly seduced by the divine sounds springing out of his consciousness.
His father never knew that beneath the righteous exterior of his introverted son, lay a fascination with the dark arts of Afrobeat and the immorality that came with it.
Channeling his studiousness with academic books into freestyling, Fireboy DML became a professor who cracked the code of skillfully arranging Afrobeat melodies in a way that spoke to the Nigerianness of every citizen who heard it.
The deep-seated lust in his soul seeped into his songs, contaminating the television and radio airwaves, and giving Naija boys the right sounds to unleash when wooing ladies.
Before Nigerians became victims of Fireboy’s music, he had to make the tough decision to move to Lagos after school without going home.
Wishing to blow up first without a big record like YBNL signing him, the talented lad focused on working out his own sounds. Once he perfected his unique sound as an artiste, that would be the scepter he wielded in arresting the ears of all who heard him.
His move to Lagos exposed him to the music game and the kind of music commercially accepted across the states. So, he cleverly tweaked his style until it started resonating with the average street kid.
READ ALSO: “I Had To Take A Step Back To Properly Improve On My Craft,” Fireboy Says
While he kept working on his songs, the unforgiving reality of life began caving in on him as he squatted with some friends in Lagos, with his rent on the verge of expiring.
All he had were his voice and his dreams. Adedamola, as he was known then, had no money.
As he approached the expiry date of his rent, he started second-guessing his idea to “blow up” on his own. If he had just stopped turning down some top labels already approaching him, he wouldn’t have had an issue with money.
Still, those labels weren’t what he wanted.
The night before his rent was due, Fireboy was caught between accepting just any label or packing his suitcase to go meet his parents away from Lagos and continue hustling from there.
Racking his brain hard, the sedative effect of sleep mixed in with analysis paralysis led him to close his eyes and fast forward to the next morning.
The money he made from songwriting by uploading one-minute videos on Soundcloud was peanuts and didn’t prove to be enough to cover his rent. Believing in a better tomorrow, Adedamola had always put up his short freestyles on Instagram hoping to “blow” somehow.
Waking up the next day, he knew that this was it for him.
His journey ended here.
All of the potential to hold Nigeria under sway through his natural romantic sounds was trapped inside him forever, about to be shut down.
Another dream was about to be killed in Lagos.
Looking around his room, he gave in to the air of hopelessness serenading him and did the only thing he knew how to do.
Go to the studio.
At least, recording another song few people would hear would serve as anesthesia to deaden the pain of utter failure he was about to experience.
As the bleak day wore on, someone miraculously reached out to him on the phone to tell him that Olamide was listening to his music and he was feeling it.
The voice from the other end added that Badoo would like to chat with him, and he sent him a number to call, claiming that it belonged to Olamide.
Adedamola was unable to believe what was going on. It happened too fast. In his mind, it had to be a scam because Olamide’s number could not just fall on his lap like that.
This person was definitely trying to explore his financial vulnerability.
While still coming to terms with it, the person chipped in that Olamide wanted to speak with him.
Tired of being taken for a fool, Adedamola finally blurted out. “Are you kidding me? You’re giving me Olamide’s number like this and you expect me to believe this?”
Mentally preparing what to say when chatting with the scam number, Adedamola got talking with the supposed Olamide, yet he still didn’t believe that it was actually Olamide.
Not until he saw on Olamide’s official Instagram page his picture displayed with a caption that read, “Welcome to YBNL.”
It was only then that it hit him.
He has been signed by Olamide Badoo.
To YBNL Nation.
Impossible.
YBNL Management made plans for Adedamola to come over and finish up the signing contract with the record label. There and then, he met Olamide face-to-face and penned down his name in the books of one of the hottest record labels in Nigeria.
Adedamola attracted Olamide merely by working so hard on creating his personalized Afrobeat sound, and it paid off on the very day his rent was due.
After the signing, he got to work on creating his first single under YBNL, but not before transforming himself into the sleek Fireboy DML we all know now. Fireboy DML infused those sensuous sounds he had always had as a schoolkid into this song and named it “Jealous.”
With this, he infiltrated every home in Nigeria as “Jealous” became the sound that defined how Gen Z kids experienced love. Watch the now-transformed Fireboy DML singing “Jealous” under YBNL Nation:
