Afrobeats (sometimes called Afropop) refers to a range of African popular-music styles that have gone global in recent years. Streams on Spotify increased more than six-fold between 2017 and 2022, and by 33% in 2024 alone. African acts from King Sunny Ade, a Nigerian juju singer, to Amadou & Mariam, a Malian blues duo, have played on festival stages in America and Britain since the 1970s. But as African diasporas have grown, some artists now perform abroad more often than at home.
Songs are a fraction of the length of Fela Kuti's 15-minute ensembles from the 1980s, made more digestible for a generation of TikTok dancers. Cross-genre collaborations, samples and interpolations have become the norm. Rema, one of the world's most streamed African artists, featured Selena Gomez on a remix for his 2023 hit "Calm Down", which became the first song led by an African artist to exceed 1bn streams on Spotify. Nigerian artists have collaborated with Amapiano hitmakers in South Africa, who slow down European drum-and-bass beats and fuse them with log drums and local languages.
A more global sound has brought more global ownership. Spotify paid 58bn naira ($36.5m) to rights-holders of Nigerian music in 2024, but because many artists and their labels have links with global firms, little of that stayed in Nigeria. Artists earn more from streams in richer countries than in poorer ones; Spotify says royalties are proportional to subscription prices, which vary widely (around $2 a month in Ghana, $17 in Switzerland). The financial benefits of producing music that does well in the West can sway artistic choices. Davido, a Nigerian-American singer, later recalled of a collaboration with Sony: "The songs were not picked by me."
The steady state of disks is full.