Mary Ekah
As the Nigerian music industry continues with its effort to build significant public awareness and support for the new national fight against piracy of music, movies, literature, broadcast content, software and other creative rights, which is undermining investments in the Nigerian creative industry, it has concluded plans to hold once again its annual, ‘No Music Day’. Billed to hold today, September 1, across Nigeria with the theme, ‘Music for National Stability’’, ‘No Music Day’ is a day the music industry has dedicated to bringing the attention of the Nigerian nation to the widespread infringement of the rights of song writers, composers, performers, music publishers, record labels and other stakeholders in the music industry.
Speaking on the theme of this year’s event, renowned Intellectual Property activist and Chairman, Copyright Society of Nigeria (COSON), Chief Tony Okoroji, said “Every year, in marking ‘No Music Day’, our objective has been to engage the Nigerian people and the various governments on the potential contributions of Nigerian music to the socio-economic development of the Nigerian nation and the necessity to fully deploy the substantial comparative advantage which our nation possesses in this area, so as to provide hundreds of thousands of well-paying jobs to the teeming masses of Nigerian youth who parade the streets of our country with little hope.†In commemoration of ‘No Music Day’, as has become the practice, broadcast stations across Nigeria have been requested not to broadcast music between the hours of 8a.m. and 10a.m. on Friday, September 1, 2017, as a mark of solidarity with the nation’s creative industry whose potential has been limited by massive copyright infringement.
