Nigerian Afropop star, Yemi Alade, has opened up about the painful challenges she faced as a young, aspiring female artiste trying to find her footing in the music industry.
In a recent episode of the Swift Conversations podcast, the Johnny hitmaker revealed that sexual harassment was one of the biggest obstacles she encountered in her early career, recalling how she was repeatedly targeted by music executives during meetings and studio sessions—at a time when she was still a teenager.
Yemi Alade explained that she initially believed her talent alone would be enough to open doors for her.
“In those beginning days, all I thought I needed was my talent because that’s all I had,” she said.
“I didn’t have a bank account full of money to sponsor myself. I just had talent, zeal, and a promise I made to myself—and a promise I believed God made to me. So I always tried to show up.”
But Yemi Alade said that despite working hard, she soon realised the industry demanded much more—often for the wrong reasons.
“There were doors I needed to walk up to, and when I walked up to the doors, they didn’t want my talent, they wanted something else,” Yemi Alade recounted.
She described several disturbing experiences, including incidents where top executives attempted to touch her inappropriately during formal meetings.
“Many times, from business meetings to studio sessions to even winning certain awards, you meet the managing director or another executive and they’re rubbing your thighs under the table. And I was just a teen,” she revealed. “My grandpa is rubbing my legs and I can’t speak because I’m in shock. We are having an actual business meeting—why are you rubbing my thighs?”
The harassment became so frequent that she began questioning whether music was truly the career she wanted to pursue.
“I had to speak to myself and decide if music was what I wanted to do because the sexual harassment was becoming too rampant,” she said. “But something in me told me to keep pushing my talent.”
Determined not to give up, Yemi Alade continued to show up wherever opportunities appeared.
“If a door was left open for me, I would walk in. If it was shut in my face, I would walk away,” she said.
The award-winning singer added that her breakthrough came when she stopped waiting for permission and started forging her own path.
She concluded:
“I became successful after I realised I needed to stop walking through the doors and start breaking down the walls.”
