Few Nigerian artistes and one of the foremost marketers in Alaba International Market, T-Joe, are currently involved in a messy rancor. While the younger ones have resorted to public out cry and spoiling for a fight, the eldest and most senior to them all, Charles Oputa alias Charly Boy, has involved the marketer in a legal brawl. The bone of contention here is the evasion of royalties owing to the artistes by the marketer-T-Joe.
The artistes affected are Modenine, 2-Shotz, Bigiano and Clench. Even though their agreements with the marketer vary, they are all complaining of grumpy payment.
In the case of Modenine, his agreement with the marketer was based on the pay as you go basis, meaning that he ought to be paid based on the number of sales. T-Joe returned Clench’s master CD to him because they couldn’t reach a consensus; 2-Shortz is signed to T-Joe Records while Charly Boy and Bigiano sold their audio CDs out rightly for N2M each.
From what we gathered, T-Joe and Clench already had an agreement of N2M for the out right sale of the audio CD but on the completion of the project, T-Joe changed his mind saying that he could no longer afford to pay N2M for the audio CD and he proposed N1M to the artiste. Clench declined at first but was later boxed into agreeing since he had no such offers from any other marketer. He withdrew his CD from T-Joe when the proposed NIM was not forth coming. In the case of 2-Shotz, T-Joe was meant to shoot five videos from his current album but he had only shot two. 2-Shotz is currently mounting pressure on him to shoot the remaining three videos but the unyielding attitude of the marketer is the cause of their disagreement. Modenine and Charly Boy are worried because of the lack of payment after months of the albums’ release, a situation that has forced the latter to take legal action against the marketer. With the recent developments in the past few days, it seems peace is slowly but surely being restored.
According to T-Joe, he has been mandated by the court to pay N50, 000 every week to Charly Boy through his lawyer till payment for the N2M is completed and so far, he has paid Modenine N270, 000.
T-Joe later explained to Glitz Stage the cause of the whole brouhaha. One of his complaints was that Modenine and Charly Boy’s album sales are very poor. He said since the release of Modenine’s album, he has only sold 25,000 copies. He explained that Bigiano still owes him N2.6M. Reason being that he was responsible for all the expenses of his video, Shayo, in South-Africa which was actually not part of their agreement. Now Bigiano wants him to take over the VCD project but he is not interested. He further expressed that even though he would love to shoot more videos for 2-Short as part of their contractual agreement, his state of preparedness at the moment is in question. And as for Clench, he returned his master CD to him as a business decision
