While Gyakie is affectionately known as the “Songbird” for her sweet melodies, she might identify more closely with a night owl. Ever since she started making music in 2019 with her reggae-tinged debut single “Love Is Pretty,” Gyakie (real name Jackline Acheampong) discovered that music flowed freely out of her in the moonlight hours.

“Anytime I had studio sessions in the evenings, I got very creative. I’m able to get the perfect lyrics. I’m able to imagine the kind of things I want to say and I’m able to do it well,” she tells Billboard.

Whether she was recording in the U.K., Nigeria or Ghana, those intimate, candlelit studio sessions created a serene environment for Gyakie to make her debut album, aptly titled After Midnight. She details different matters of the heart, like expressing adoration on the titular interlude but also debating going back to an ex if her current lover doesn’t treat her right on the lead single “sankofa,” named after the mythical backwards-facing bird symbol from the Akan tribe. And she further expands the borders of her Afro-fusion sound on the album, from the traditional drums from her native Ashanti region of Ghana on the “intro” to the sweeping string arrangement on the invigorating gospel closer “hallelujah.” “When you’re listening to it, you can see that it starts from the very soulful songs and then it builds up gradually and then it goes back to the soulful songs. That is really how my life and my entire artistry is,” she explains.

From American R&B icons like Nina Simone and Teddy Pendergrass to Ghanaian highlife legends like her own father, Nana Acheampong, and Gyedu-Blay Ambolley, she was surrounded by music that spoke to one’s soul. Little Gyakie and her younger brother Justin posed with studio headphones alongside their father in a booth for the cover of her 2020 debut EP Seed, where her breakout hit “Forever” was planted: After earning a remix with Omah Lay in 2021, “Forever” reached No. 3 on Billboard’s Top Triller Global chart and Shazam’s Top 200 chart. That year, Gyakie was named the emerging woman of the year at the 3Music Awards, the annual Ghanaian music awards ceremony that later honored her as the woman of the year in 2022, and signed a record deal with RCA Records UK. While the Songbird quickly took flight, Gyakie has kept soaring since.

In the five months surrounding the release of her debut album, Gyakie was featured on Forbes Africa 30 Under 30 list, was named the Spotify EQUAL Africa Ambassador in September and Billboard’s African Rookie of the Month in October. “I view my life as a big room that has so many doors. Everything happening right now is like a new door being opened for me,” she says.

Billboard spoke with Gyakie about juggling her international business degree with her budding musical career, spending three years recording After Midnight and sampling her father’s classic and featuring her favorite rapper on one of its tracks.  

How much did your father’s career path in the music industry impact you to carve out your own?

When I dropped my first EP – the artwork had a picture of me and my dad in the studio – everybody was questioning, “This whole time that’s your dad?!” Whenever I went for interviews, I explained how in the beginning of my career, I never mentioned him because I wanted to do this by myself. After people found out later on, they understood why I have always been passionate about music.

When did you decide for yourself that music wasn’t only a passion but something you were called to do for the rest of your life?

I loved entertainment, I loved music, but I didn’t think I was going to do it as a profession. I [studied] international business, thinking after college I was going to find my way around the corporate world. But after I dropped my first single “Love Is Pretty,” I dropped it thinking it was just going to be one of those demos you just record for fun and send to your friends and family. I started getting really emotional messages from listeners, talking about they want to hear more from me, my voice is very different. The more I got messages from people telling me how the music has connected with their soul, it made me realize that maybe this is my calling. This is what I am supposed to do on earth.   

How did your upbringing in Kumasi, Ghana impact the music you listen to and the music you make?

My lifestyle was from the house, you go to school, from school, you go to church, and then you come back home. One of the reasons was because of my dad – he was checking in all the time, so we really weren’t going anywhere. And Kumasi is very calm and very serene. Because of that, I used to always listen to soulful, calm music. My dad makes highlife. Being in such a space and hearing those kinds of sounds and being in an environment that is very serene, it influenced the kind of artists I was listening to: Sade, Nina Simone, Louis Armstrong, Teddy Pendergrass, Etta James, a lot of soulful, jazz, R&B music.

How did you actually start making music?

I was on campus in my second year, and I remember bumping into the producer that I work with now [Sosa] through a friend. Out of curiosity, I paid them a visit and saw some microphones and was like, “Oh, are these for studio recordings?” And out of a joke, I was like, “You should send me some beats. I want to make a song.” And [Sosa] actually sent the beats. I remember going to his hostel on campus to record the next day, and that was how the journey began for me.

How did you balance school and music at the same time?

Girl, sometimes I’m like, “How did I even do this?” When I look back now at how everything played out, it makes me appreciate that I was a strong lady, I just didn’t see it in the moment. I would be in class, and right after class, I would need to take the next bus for five hours to Accra for an interview, and I would need to get on the bus back to campus in Kumasi. Sometimes I’ll be studying in school, and when I go back [home], I’ll need to finish a record. It was a lot to the point where I would think, “Maybe I should drop one at the moment.” But I wanted to be able to handle the two at the same time. It was not easy at all because my hit song “Forever” blew up when I was in my third year, about to go into my final year.

Did the thought ever cross your mind to pursue music full time and not see your degree through? 

What stopped that decision from happening was COVID. “Forever” blew up in 2021, and we weren’t allowed to play shows or travel, so I was doing things online. Maybe, if at that time the outside was open and I was moving around, touring with the song, that would have been very tricky for me. With how big the song was, that could have been a thought in my mind.

What kind of sounds and styles does your music encompass? How would you describe your music in your own words?

Everything around my music is directed toward causing a shift in the listeners’ emotions. I always want to say something that will touch something within their emotions [and] play an instrument that will make you remember something emotional, whether happy or sad times or moments they are longing for.

I always say my music is versatile. I could be doing jazz today, then the next day I’m doing highlife, the next day I’m doing hip-hop. But majority of the time, I always love soulful, really calm, relaxing type of music because anytime I’m in the studio, I’m very relaxed, so it’s always reflected in the kind of music I make and the kind of things I talk about.

You’ve said it took three years to make After Midnight. I can imagine that the person you were when you started this album is not the same person who finished this album. What were the biggest changes that you underwent as an artist and as a person?

Patience is one of them. You can put pressure on yourself and try to do anything, or you can have the patience till the words or melodies come to you. That is how I work. Because it was a 17-track album, imagine having creative blocks in and out and you’re supposed to do a song in a day and you’re now using two weeks to do it. Even though I was getting a lot of messages from people about when the album is coming, it made me feel bad sometimes and wanting to just give what I had. But I also wanted to be patient, to be able to do everything that had to be done for the project and everything around it to be a classic.

Another thing I learned was that it’s very normal for you to lose people. I lost some people within this time frame because I kind of lost touch with reality and I was mainly focused on the project. Anybody that wasn’t really trying to understand me in that space, I allowed the person to make a decision that they wanted to make.

You named the album After Midnight because most of the songs were made that late at night/early in the morning. Why did that time create such a prime setting for you to make your project? Have you always been that way when it comes to recording music, or was this something new that you developed around the time that you were making the album?

That has been how I’ve been making music since 2019. I have done sessions in the afternoon, I have done sessions in the evening. When you grow as a person, you study yourself the way people study other people and things and notice changes within them. One of the things I noticed about myself was anytime I had studio sessions in the evenings, I got very creative. I’m able to get the perfect lyrics. I’m able to imagine the kind of things I want to say and I’m able to do it well, compared to when I’m recording during the day. I realized, “When it’s daytime and there are a lot of colors around, there are people moving, I get easily distracted and it delays whatever I’m trying to create.” So I opted for the studio sessions where it’s just me and the producer. And [we’re] in the dark with just a candle. Imagine a setting like that and the kind of music it will inspire you to make.

You’ve identified “no one,” “is it worth it?” and “hallelujah” as the motivational records from the project. Why was it important for your fans to hear those records?

I wrote the lyrics in a way that, if you are not singing the songs and you’re just reading, you would see that this is somebody actually giving you words of inspiration. And these three songs are actually my experiences and how I feel. A song like “no one” is for confidence, a song like “hallelujah” is really inspirational. “Is it worth it?” was me questioning life and the afterlife. These are thoughts that come in my mind. I know that people relate to certain things like that, but they just don’t talk about it. So when they listen to these kind of songs, that’s what makes them connect to the music so much. I know there’s a message in there that’s supposed to go to somebody, and that person will listen to it.

Why did you want to sample the instrumental from your father’s hit “Nanka Ebeye Den” on “y2k luv”?

Because I was making a song with [Omar Sterling], someone that I actually love his music so much, the nostalgia from the name of the track, the production being old school hip-hop, it made sense to sample a record that is also going to give the people that nostalgia. It only made sense for me to sample a record from my dad, and I picked the one that was a classic because “y2k luv” is a classic.

I read your 2021 Teen Vogue interview, and you mentioned that Sterling inspired two songs on your debut EP Seed. Do you remember which songs from Seed?

It was the intro [“Joy and Happiness”] and the outro, which is “The Journey.” Those two songs are where I tested my love for rap, and they came out really good. The inspiration was from Omar Sterling because that is the type of sound and the type of vibe his music leans toward.

Who would you love to collaborate with next?

I would love to work with Dave from the U.K. I think we’d make an amazing record together. That should be at the top of my bucket list. And then if I were to pick one lady, it would be Jorja Smith. Oh my goodness, and Doechii! Doechii, SZA or Jorja Smith would be huge.

What’s been the biggest “pinch me” moment of your career so far?

The day I had to do my album listening in Ghana. I remember looking at the time and seeing it being midnight, the day the album got released. It felt like the gospel that I’ve been putting together has finally been available to the people that I love so much, and that is my fans. It felt unbelievable – finishing this album and having to listen to it over and over, waiting for the day to come, that anticipation. Being able to do this three-year project and it coming out, it felt like a dream come true for me.

What else is next for Gyakie for the rest of the year and in 2026?

There are a lot of music videos coming. I am planning on going on tour. We are going to be doing so much around this project — because it’s 17 songs, and there’s so much that we can do, and so many people that have yet to hear it.

The music business is changing — and fast. Between the three major music companies — Sony, Universal and Warner — restructuring their recorded music divisions, the rise of generative AI tools in the recording studio, the growth of streaming service subscriptions slowing down, the difficulty of turning TikTok virality into true fans, it’s common to hear music business workers question where the industry is going next. And with an overall shaky economy and job market, the future feels even more uncertain. 

For this week’s episode of Billboard’s new music business podcast On the Record w/ Kristin Robinson, prominent music industry investor and entrepreneur Matt Pincus comes on the show to explain how the music biz has transformed, where he sees it going next, and how it increasingly relates to the overall economy.

Pincus is perhaps best known as the founder of independent publisher SONGS, which quickly grew into a formidable player in music publishing, signing acts like The Weeknd, Lorde, Pharrell, Diplo and more during its run from 2006 to 2017. After Pincus sold the company to Kobalt for a reported $150 million, he decided to refocus his energy on helping other investors build up music empires of their own through his investment company, MUSIC. To date, he’s deployed $180 million in capital across businesses like Splice, HIFI, LVRN, Kobalt, Dice and Soundtrack Your Brand. 

Below is an excerpt of our conversation on this week’s episode of On the Record, focusing on one area of change that Pincus has been watching especially closely: the financialization of the music business. 

Watch or listen to the full episode of On the Record on YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts here, or watch it below.

I think the investors’ perspective is really helpful right now. It feels like we are on the precipice of a lot of change in this industry across many sectors. I’ve been trying to understand why, and one of the things I know you’ve mentioned to me before is how the increasing financialization of the music business is really having an impact. Can you explain what you mean by that? 

This has been a big change, starting maybe 10 years ago, but really five years ago. When I was younger, the music business had two kinds of investors: the major labels, and then private money — usually wealthy entrepreneurs who would put money behind private businesses. Every now and then, you’d get a stray pension fund. That was looking for returns for their insurance company to wander into the business, usually to a great disaster, but it was pretty much a self-contained business.

Is this because others did not feel the music industry was a good investment?

It used to be a lot less transparent than it is now, so it was more of a relationship business. You had to understand how to get paid. I think financial people thought that was too risky. But also, [music] was a cash till for larger media companies. It was a guilty pleasure for movie studios that had a little unit that churned a bunch of cash flow that they could use to lubricate their businesses, but it wasn’t really big enough to be a global business, so it didn’t attract financial markets. 

So when did you first see financial players get interested in music?

They started wandering into it in the early 2000s. That was the first time I started to see it. Hedge funds in the early 2000s had these things called “side pockets” — this little pocket of private investment capital that they started putting into increasingly exotic things. It started with them investing in music royalties…because they split off predictable cash flows. 

Interest rates went way down, so that meant that it was harder to earn yield-type of returns. So they started buying increasingly exotic things. Lo and behold, music acts like a weird kind of bond when you look at an old catalog. That’s where it started. 

Then on the equity side, people increasingly started to invest in growth companies on the technology side after Spotify, because Spotify was such a massive success. Before that, there weren’t really venture investments in the music business of any renown. 

Like, there’s a company called Echo Nest that had a successful exit — it sold to Spotify, but really, how many successful venture-backed businesses have been in the music business? You can count them on one hand. But the way that the equity markets were so loaded with risk over the past 10 years or so, people started getting increasingly interested in the music business and what could be done. So you ended up with this financialization, first starting with the copyright business. 

How has the financialization of the copyright business changed it over time? 

Historically, if you wanted to buy a catalog of music copyrights, and you weren’t like a music publisher, you would have to put up 50% of money, you go to the bank and borrow the other 50% of the money. And it was a pretty simple structure to buy a catalog. Now, it’s evolved into a world where it’s like a mortgage market — you have your equity, which is sometimes only 10% of the overall money being used to buy something, then you have a mezzanine piece of debt that’s paying a higher interest rate, and you have a bank loan. Then, when they get it up to a certain level, they sell the debt off to the public in a thing called an ‘asset backed securitization’ (ABS). It’s become this complicated wizardry of capital structure over the past little while, which has a lot of implications.

Like what?

Recently Robert Kyncl [CEO of WMG] just did an interview where he was talking about whether the internet was good or bad for music. One way you could say it’s good for music is that the value of music copyrights has exploded. That’s partially true. I agree with him, but there’s also another factor — the financialization of music. The way that people are structuring these deals allows them to pay more, but now the industry has changed. It used to be a self-contained world, but now Blackstone, PIMCO, BlackRock, KKR, all these big financial institutions, have exposure to it. This correlates the music business more with how the broader economy behaves than it used to. 

Meanwhile, there’s been consolidation of the majors. When I started, there were five majors. Now there are three. Plus now, [as of the last five years], two of the three majors have become public, pure-play music companies. And what that means is that anything that happens in music gets tattooed on the stock price of two companies the next day. So people start watching the implications of things that happen on the music business and activist investors get interested in the stock… you start enmeshing the music business with the broader economy in a bunch of ways it didn’t use to be. 

I’ve heard it said before that the music industry is recession-proof or recession-resistent. Given what you’ve been saying about the increasing financialization of the music business, do you think that is actually true?

I totally agree that it used to be uncorrelated to inversely correlated [with the overall economy.] Music is a small consumer purchase. So when the economy goes down, people may not go on vacation, but they’ll still buy records or concert tickets. I think that’s definitely true. 

If you look back to the late 80s, the stock market tanked in ‘87 but a lot of the great music stuff happened around that time. [Music] was like a local economy where it only dealt with itself, but now, [music] is connected to global markets. 

It feels a little bit like gentrification. Like, one day you know everybody in your local neighborhood, and then, all of a sudden, somebody comes in and starts buying up all the buildings in your neighborhood. Some people get really rich from it. Some people have a hard time finding a place to live as a result. And at one point you’re like, ‘wait a minute, I can’t find a place to live, and where did all the cool people go?’ The music business is a little bit like that. They just never got around to us. Because the financial markets are able to analyze things better than they used to, find transparency in areas that used to be opaque and look for returns anywhere and everywhere they can around the world, they got around to us. 

Is this a good thing or a bad thing, in your view?

In some cases, that’s meant really great things. I mean, I would not be doing what I’m doing 10 years ago. Nobody would have given me $200 million bucks and said, ‘go invest in music companies’ 10 years ago, and the trend that Hipgnosis started by raising catalog values has made a lot of musicians very rich. More musicians making more money is a great thing, but it’s also sometimes complicated. 

The hosts of Podcrushed — actor Penn Badgley with Nava Kavelin and Sophie Ansari — are tackling a brand-new medium with this week’s release of Crushmore: Essays on Love, Loss, and Coming-of-Age. And at 5 p.m. ET/2 p.m. PT Thursday (Oct. 16), the trio will join Billboard Book Club for a livestream to chat all about the essay collection and sell signed copies.

For the latest installment of Billboard Book Club, the trio behind Podcrushed — a podcast launched in 2022 to explore the awkwardness and heartbreak that defines adolescence — will talk about their Crushmore book, which continues the journey to unpack the importance of middle school self-discovery. Guests on the Podcrushed podcast have included Ariana Grande, Jonas Brothers, Jenna Ortega, Drew Barrymore and Badgley’s Gossip Girl co-star Leighton Meester.

Powered by TalkShopLive, the Podcrushed live shoppable interview will air at 5 p.m. ET/2 p.m. PT on Thursday, where fans can order a copy of the book, including a version signed by Badgley, Kavelin and Ansari. The full conversation will be available for anyone to watch in the video player above or on Billboard socials.

Billboard Book Club first launched in April, with its kick-off interview with Spice Girls’ Geri Halliwell-Horner. The singer joined Billboard to talk about her book Rosie Frost: Ice on Fire, the sequel to New York Times bestseller Rosie Frost & the Falcon Queen. In June, Victoria Monét joined Billboard Book Club to chat about penning Everywhere You Are, an adorable illustrated children’s book about a moon who comforts a young star as they part ways at dawn. And just this week, Canadian singer/songwriter Jessie Reyez joined Billboard Book Club for a shoppable interview around her The People’s Purge poetry collection.

You can find all of Billboard‘s shoppable TalkShopLive interviews here, including past chats with Garth Brooks, Sabrina Carpenter, Shaboozey and more.

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Nick Offerman loves wood — both literally and in terms of Taylor Swift songs.

While guesting on The View on Thursday (Oct. 16), the Parks and Recreation alum — who is coming out with a new wood-crafts book titled Little Woodchucks — shared his thoughts on “Wood,” the slightly NSFW song on the pop star’s The Life of a Showgirl album. At first, Offerman joked that he and Swift had coordinated the releases of their respective projects, as “we didn’t want to soak the market with wood-related things.”

The actor went on to say, “I do not want to sound cocky when I’m talking about my woodworking, but I did do sort of an interpretive reading of the lyrics for my wife, and we’re in negotiations.”

“I sent it to her, she said she’s got some ideas, because I wasn’t sure what the whole song was about,” he continued. “I do work with redwood trees on occasion.”

Offerman’s wife is actress Megan Mullally, who has appeared alongside her husband in multiple projects — including Parks, in which Offerman’s character, Ron Swanson, is also a big fan of woodworking. The actor’s new book shows families how to execute fun projects involving wood.

On the song “Wood,” Swift sings about a very different kind of material. Though she frames the track around good-luck rituals such as knocking on wood, it’s clear that the innuendo-packed lyrics also refer to fiancé Travis Kelce’s you-know-what — something he played coy about on an episode of New Heights.

“It’s a great song,” he said. “I love that girl … any song that she would reference me in that way …”

When brother Jason Kelce pointed out that the song’s lyrics — including “Redwood tree, it ain’t hard to see/ His love was thе key that opened my thighs” — are definitely about a certain “appendage,” Travis continued to dance around the topic. “I think you’re not understanding the song,” he teased.

Watch Offerman talk about wood and “Wood” on The View above.