Tiwa Savage: Ciara's new single 'Freak Me' with Tekno features sampling of singers' 2016 song

Ciara has released her new single, 'Freak Me' featuring Tekno and questions are being asked if the song which samples Tiwa Savage's 'Before Nko' was properly cleared.

Ciara has released her new single, titled, 'Freak Me' featuring Tekno which samples a previously released single by Tiwa Savage, 'Before Nko'.

The singer who has enjoyed a level of recent success with her comeback single, 'Level Up', which went viral online has now teamed up with talented Nigerian producer and songwriter, Tekno for her new single.

'Freak Me' sees Ciara aiming to spread her music to the African market as she taps into the Afrobeats sound with help from Tekno on the vocals.

But the biggest takeaway from the song is that it is not as original as you may think.

The song samples a previously released single by singer Tiwa Savage titled,'Before Nko', a record released under her 2016 EP, ''R.E.D''.

The song shares not just the same element, but lines from the lyrics of the song are even identical, with the title of Ciara's single adopted from Tiwa's hook.

Considering how hard Ciara is pushing this as a single, just at the time her music is gaining fresh attention with her last song finding its way to the top of the global charts, it begs to wonder if she is fully aware that the song had already been released two years ago.

Listen to both versions of the song here:

 

With the recent incursion of Afrobeats into the international market, a number of American acts are jumping on the wave and seeing they cannot win over the African audience on their own, they are deploying other means like collaboration or sampling to achieve their aim, like the case of Drake with Wizkid on 'One Dance'.

Even though Tiwa Savage's name is credited as a songwriter on streaming platforms, it is still unclear if Ciara or her team got the right clearance to sample her song, eyebrows are being raised in many quarters especially with the presence of Tekno on the song.

 

Tekno has on more than one occasion gotten himself involved in cases of uncleared sampling, with the latest incident involving Danfo Drivers for the song, 'Jogodo.'

Pulse has reached out to Tiwa Savage but her team did not respond to requests for comment.

With sampling, you need well communicated clearances, either from the copyright owner of the song, usually a music publisher, and from the copyright owner of the master recordings, usually a record company.

And if we are to have more of these criss-cross collaborations, then it is important that things are done right, so we don't continuously end up having cases like that of Burna Boy and Drake, where the song he wrote, 'More Life' was chopped and recreated into 'Get It Together,' which features Black Coffee and Jorja Smith, without any form of credit given to Burna.