Ten years ago, if you played an Afrobeats track at a party outside Lagos or London’s Nigerian diaspora community, you would probably have had to explain what it was. Today, Burna Boy sells out Madison Square Garden. Wizkid collaborates with Beyoncé. The genre has completed one of the most remarkable cultural journeys in modern music.

The streaming breakthrough

The turning point was Spotify’s African expansion and the proliferation of cheap Android smartphones. For the first time, African artists could reach global audiences without a Western record label. Afrobeats streams grew by over 550% between 2017 and 2023.

We didn’t wait for the world to come to us. We put the music where the world already was.

Beyond Nigeria

The global success of the Nigerian wave has created space for adjacent sounds: Ghana’s Afropop, South Africa’s Amapiano, East Africa’s Bongo Flava. Amapiano has gone from township parties to international festival stages in under five years, using the same social media and streaming pathways.