How Afrobeats Took Over the World

At the 2025 Grammy Awards, Tems won Best African Music Performance for “Love Me JeJe.” Two weeks earlier, Burna Boy had sold out Madison Square Garden for the third consecutive year. Davido performed a headline set at Coachella. Wizkid’s “Essence” is still, five years after its release, one of the most streamed songs on the planet. None of this happened by accident.

Afrobeats, the catch-all term for the wave of Nigerian and broader West African popular music that has reshaped global pop over the last decade, is no longer a subgenre working its way into the mainstream. It is the mainstream, or at least a major current running through it. Understanding how that happened requires going back to Lagos in the early 2010s, when a generation of young Nigerians decided to make music that sounded like where they were from instead of where they were trying to get to.

The term itself is slippery. “Afrobeats” with an ‘s’ is a modern catch-all and is distinct from “Afrobeat,” the political funk pioneered by Fela Kuti in the 1970s. The contemporary genre encompasses Afropop, Afro-fusion, Afro-soul, Afrohouse, and a dozen other hyphenated substreams. What they share is a rhythmic foundation built around the clave, borrowed from West African percussion traditions, a production aesthetic that values warmth and space over the compressed loudness of American pop, and a lyrical sensibility that mixes romance, street life, and Yoruba, Pidgin, and Igbo language with English in ways that feel natural rather than marketed.

Wizkid and Davido were the first wave to break internationally, carving out streaming numbers in the mid-2010s that announced there was a global audience for this music if labels were willing to pay attention. They were followed by Burna Boy, whose crossover happened slightly later but landed harder, culminating in a Grammy win for Best Global Music Album in 2021 for Twice as Tall. The Beyonce co-sign on “Essence” in 2021 was not the beginning of Afrobeats’ mainstream moment, but it was the point at which Western media could no longer pretend it hadn’t already arrived.

What followed was, inevitably, a gold rush. Labels began signing Nigerian artists at a pace that could charitably be called opportunistic. Streaming playlist curators started stacking Afrobeats tracks against Black American music in ways that flattened both traditions. There were legitimate debates within the Nigerian music community about what happens when an art form built on local specificity gets absorbed into a global content pipeline that doesn’t care about the specificity, only the sound.

Those debates are ongoing. But the remarkable thing is that the music has remained vital through the commercial explosion. Artists like Asake, Seun Kuti, Adekunle Gold, and Ayra Starr have maintained the genre’s stylistic range even as Afrobeats has become shorthand for Nigerian pop broadly. Tems, who performed on US late-night television just this week, represents a strand of the tradition that prioritizes emotional depth over danceable rhythm, and the fact that her career is thriving suggests the genre is not being narrowed by its mainstream moment.

The story of Afrobeats is also, inevitably, a story about the internet. This is music that was built for mobile phones and data-limited streaming in markets where physical media had already become irrelevant. It was native to a distribution system that the Western industry was still figuring out, which gave Nigerian artists an edge that had nothing to do with label backing. They were already living in the future of how music gets made and consumed.

A decade from now, the early 2020s will probably be remembered as the moment when music stopped having a single dominant Western center and became genuinely global in its production and influence. Afrobeats will be a major part of that story. It already is.