In 2016, Afrobeats – the catchall term for a range of contemporary dance music emerging from west Africa – began to seep into global pop culture, propelled by intercontinental collaborations such as Wizkid and Drake’s Come Closer. Olabode Otolorin, then a university student, would dispatch optimistic forecasts on the internet about the genre’s future. Nearly a decade on and now a campaign associate at Mavin Records, one of Africa’s leading labels, Otolorin has a more downbeat outlook on Afrobeats. “It is currently in a perilous state in terms of our exports,” he says.
Otolorin is not alone in this sentiment. Addressing the 200 or so fans gathered at a spruced-up warehouse in Lagos for a recent listening party for his new album, Clarity of Mind, Afrobeats stalwart Omah Lay made a startling but accurate observation. “Afrobeats is declining overseas – that’s a fact. The sound from 2020 to 2024 isn’t what it is today. I’ve been watching, learning and studying my idols, looking for a way to bring that energy back,” he said pensively.
“Younger artists are still optimistic, believing they can go global,” says Melody Ifeanyi Adigo, a broadcaster who has interviewed major African stars such as Davido and Adekunle Gold. “But when I speak to more established artists, I mostly get a sense that they’re just trying to survive these times.”
If 2016 marked Afrobeats’ entry into the global pop consciousness, it broke through in 2021. As the world stirred from the pandemic lull, the genre surged worldwide as listeners latched on to its blend of syncopated drums and bright melodies, inviting comparisons to reggae at its peak. Songs such as Ckay’s Love Nwantiti and Wizkid’s Essence soundtracked millions of TikTok videos and tore through global charts including the US Hot 100 and the UK Top 40. The following year, Burna Boy’s Last Last, Oxlade’s Ku Lo Sa and Fireboy DML’s Peru, among others, were similarly dominant. In 2023, the Selena Gomez remix of Calm Down by Nigerian vocalist Rema became the biggest success of all, peaking at No 3 in the US and earning billions of streams. The genre looked invincible.
“Afrobeats has been one of our major exports, not just in terms of money but in terms of shedding more light on our culture and on the way we live,” says Joeboy, one of Nigeria’s biggest artists. “In the past, western media placed different perceptions on us but Afrobeats’ global rise has made the world interested in not just our music but our culture, our fashion, our swag.”
In West Africa today, traditional media – television, radio, and print – still drives popularity in rural areas, while in cities such as Lagos and Accra, fans now brandish streaming figures and international sales certifications in social media stan wars. But the boasts are diminishing: US chart entries for African artists dried up after Calm Down, and leading acts including Wizkid have cancelled global tours, fuelling a sense of unease throughout the scene. Even high-profile international collaborations have failed to work their usual magic: Burna Boy’s Change Your Mind, featuring US country singer Shaboozey, had little impact in his native Nigeria, to say nothing of its tepid global reception. Other big-budget efforts such as Shallipopi and Gunna’s Him, and Seyi Vibez’s collaborations last year with French Montana, NLE Choppa and Trippie Redd, have met a similar fate.
Artists and industry professionals say they are already feeling the effects of a cooling market. “Marketing budgets and advances are no longer what they used to be,” says Wale Oloworekende, managing editor of leading Nigerian culture publication the Native. “Back in 2021 and 2022, when the Afrobeats scene was flush with foreign investment, artists would splurge on getting billboard placements in Times Square,” he says, pointing out that artists also had the marketing spend, and cultural clout, to appear on US talkshows. “We aren’t seeing much of this these days because of where the genre is at. These days, artists are increasingly relying on DIY approaches such as TikTok.”
Stylistically, Afrobeats is in a state of flux as it evolves out of amapiano, a bass-driven variety of South African house music that has defined the overall scene in recent years. Previously, Afrobeats from the late 90s and early 2000s owed a great deal to the hip-hop and R&B of the day, and the genre has turned practically everywhere – traditional Ghanaian highlife, reggae, Nigerian “trenches music” and, most recently, amapiano – to keep up with the relentless demand to reinvent itself. “Currently, there’s so much fragmentation in the industry,” says Motolani Alake, a marketing manager at Virgin Music. “Amapiano no longer seems to be working. In fact, nobody knows what works and that’s causing a lot of panic.”
Dami Ajayi, a UK-based cultural strategist whose dispatches on Nigerian music are well circulated, says that Afrobeats’ global expansion “was a bubble”. Pandemic ennui made music listeners around the world more exploratory and many of them stumbled upon the chipper melodies of Afrobeats. So, when the world started to open up, Afrobeats artists could tour the world and sell records globally. “There was also the diaspora brain drain,” Ajayi says, referring to droves of migrants from west Africa to the west following the pandemic. “When Burna Boy performed at the O2, it wasn’t like the place was full of white people. It was a lot of west African immigrants and Black British people,” he continues. He believes that these effects have started to taper off as the novelty of it all dies down.
“I think a lot of us have gotten too comfortable,” Alake suggests. “Back in the day I saw how creative people were with their hustle.” He says foreign investment from major labels has given west African artists greater affluence, but “this comfort has stymied hunger in the industry [and] the innovation in music and marketing that allows cultures to thrive”.
Industry experts also worry that the rise of conservative politics and ethno-nationalism in the west has contributed to Afrobeats’ dwindling popularity. “From the outside looking in, it feels like the turn towards conservatism is generally having an impact on the arts,” Oloworekende says. The resurgence of country music and other traditionally white genres, he argues, gestures at the kinds of budgets being approved. “Afrobeats is still a niche genre on the global stage. If nativist thinking is what’s prevalent in the west, and is affecting genres like hip-hop and R&B” – rap hits have also dwindled in the US Hot 100 of late – “then obviously it’s going to trickle down to Afrobeats”.
As revenue from streaming and touring decreases, labels are less willing to fund artists with big advances to record and promote their albums. Ajayi tells me that this has set off an existential crisis in the scene. According to Don Jazzy, whose label, Mavin Records, manages stalwarts such as Rema and Ayra Starr, it now costs $100,000-$300,000 on average to launch a new talent. Promoting an Afrobeats song globally costs significantly higher. “A song like Calm Down – we probably spent close to four, five million dollars to get it to where it is,” he says. One marketing executive who spoke on condition of anonymity revealed that music videos generally cost between $20,000 and $75,000, and even promoting a single locally in Nigeria can cost as much as $90,000.
As these costs rise, many west African nations have faced crippling economic headwinds – most notably Nigeria, where an estimated 63% now sit below the poverty line – meaning that local touring and sales are less viable.
And yet many remain hopeful, reflecting a distinctly Nigerian instinct for optimism. Previously, alté – a countercultural late-2010s style of Nigerian music – never really rivalled the then blossoming mainstream. But a new wave of underground artists could secure the widespread acceptance that alté never had. Mavo has scored multiple hits, including Money Constant, which features Wizkid; Zaylevelten has kept the youth of Nigeria spellbound with his mixtape Then 1t G0t Crazy, which interprets Playboi Carti-style rage rap through a Nigerian lens.
Indicative of the shift is the fact that Homecoming, an annual Lagos festival typically headlined by the likes of Wizkid, Davido, Ayra Starr and Asake, was headlined this year by Mavo and Zaylevelten, and featured a lineup overwhelmingly dominated by underground artists. The story, therefore, is perhaps less one of decline than of realignment. “We’re recharging and everyone needs to be humble about it,” says Alake. Success, he believes, “is going to come back to us”.