Afrobeats over 50 years: How a sound born in Lagos conquered the entire world

Nigeria government responded by sending over 1,000 soldiers to burn the compound to the ground. Fela responded by releasing the album anyway. The record went on to sell across three continents. Nearly five decades later, the Recording Academy awarded Fela Kuti a posthumous Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in Los Angeles on 31 January 2026, making him the first African artist to receive the honor — and cementing the full circle of a genre journey from Lagos street protest to the most coveted stage in Western popular music.

That journey is one of the more extraordinary stories in modern cultural history. Afrobeat — and its younger, louder, more pop-oriented cousin Afrobeats — has traveled from the fringes of West African underground music to the center of the global mainstream in roughly 50 years. Along the way, it has generated USD2 billion in annual contributions to the global music economy, racked up over 14 billion streams on Spotify in 2023 alone, and produced a generation of artists who fill arenas in London, New York, Paris, and São Paulo with the same ease they fill them in Lagos, Accra, and Nairobi.

Afrobeat — without the “s” — was not an accident. It was an invention, shaped deliberately by one of the most singular figures in 20th-century music. Fela Kuti, born Olufela Olusegun Oludotun Ransome-Kuti on 15 October 1938 in Abeokuta, then colonial Nigeria, came to his musical revolution through a winding path. He studied trumpet at London Trinity College of Music in the late 1950s, absorbed the sounds of jazz and highlife while playing in the United Kingdom, then traveled to the United States in the late 1960s where he encountered the Black Power movement, the music of James Brown, and the electric funk of Sly and the Family Stone.

What he brought back to Lagos was a synthesis unlike anything the continent had heard. Fela blended traditional Yoruba rhythms with American jazz, soul, and funk, West African highlife, Caribbean calypso, and the psychedelic rock then sweeping Western culture. He called it Afrobeat — a name deliberately singular, a statement of origin and purpose. With his band, first Nigeria 70, then the legendary Africa ’70, and drummer Tony Allen providing a polyrhythmic engine that would later be described by Brian Eno as “the greatest rhythm ever invented,” Fela built a sound that was simultaneously political, hedonistic, and globally unprecedented.

His songs ran long — 10, 15, 20 minutes — because they had things to say. Albums like “Zombie” (1977), “Expensive Shit” (1975), and “Lady” (1972) attacked corrupt military governments, Western imperialism, and the subjugation of African women with the full force of 30 musicians and Fela own saxophone. He was arrested, beaten, and jailed more than 200 times by Nigerian military authorities. His mother, the legendary activist Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, was thrown from a window during the 1977 army raid on Kalakuta and died from her injuries. He kept recording.

Fela died in Lagos on 2 August 1997, from complications related to Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) — a death his family publicly disclosed, in itself a radical act of transparency in a country where the disease carried enormous stigma. He was 58. His son Femi Kuti and later Seun Kuti would carry the sound forward, each navigating the weight of a legacy both generative and constraining. In 2025, “Zombie” was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, nearly 50 years after its release and 27 years after the man who made it was gone.

The “s” matters. Afrobeats — with it — is a distinct creature. Where Fela Afrobeat was slow-burning, politically incendiary, and built for live performance, Afrobeats is pop-oriented, streaming-native, and engineered for global consumption. It developed through the 1990s and 2000s as Lagos producers began blending Fela rhythmic sensibility with hip-hop production techniques, R&B melodies, reggae and dancehall energy, and the juju and fuji traditions of Yoruba popular music. The term “Afrobeats” itself — coined not by any single artist but gradually adopted by disc jockeys (DJs) and radio presenters in the Nigerian and British-Nigerian diaspora during the mid-2000s — became an umbrella for a wide range of sounds united by their Nigerian or West African roots.

D’banj and Don Jazzy Mo’Hits Records, launched in 2004, became the first label to systematically export this new sound. D’banj “Tongolo” and “Fall in Love” reached the United Kingdom charts and drew the attention of Kanye West, who signed D’banj to G.O.O.D. Music in 2011. Around the same time, a teenager named Ayodeji Ibrahim Balogun — who would become Wizkid — released “Holla at Your Boy” in 2010 and, almost overnight, reconfigured what Nigerian pop music could aspire to be.

By the mid-2010s, three artists had emerged as the dominant forces of the new Afrobeats era: Wizkid, Davido, and Burna Boy. Industry observers and fans referred to them as the “Big 3” — a shorthand that would generate years of fierce debate but acknowledged an undeniable truth: these three artists, more than any others, broke the genre out of West Africa and into the global mainstream.

Wizkid ascent accelerated dramatically in 2016 when he was featured on Drake “One Dance,” which became the first song in history to reach one billion streams on Spotify and topped charts in 15 countries. His 2020 album “Made in Lagos” contained “Essence,” a collaboration with Lagos-born singer Tems that entered the Billboard Hot 100 and was widely described as the song of summer 2021. Wizkid became the first African artist to perform at London O2 Arena multiple times, each show selling out within hours. Veteran rapper Olamide in late 2025 described Wizkid as “the greatest Afrobeat artist ever after Fela” — a statement that ignited considerable debate.

Davido — born David Adedeji Adeleke in Atlanta, Georgia, and raised between Lagos and the United States — brought a high-energy, feel-good aesthetic to Afrobeats that proved irresistible to diaspora audiences. His 2017 single “Fall” became one of the longest-charting Nigerian pop songs in US Billboard history. In January 2024, Davido sold out Madison Square Garden in New York — all 20,000 seats — in what many commentators called a watershed moment for African music in North America.

Burna Boy — Damini Ebunoluwa Ogulu, born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, and notably the grandson of Benson Idonije, Fela Kuti first manager — has pursued a more explicitly conscious path. His 2019 album “African Giant” received a Grammy nomination for Best World Music Album, the first for an Afrobeats work. He then won that same category in 2021 for “Twice As Tall,” becoming the first Nigerian artist to win a competitive Grammy. At the 2026 Grammy Awards, Burna Boy secured his seventh consecutive nomination, a record for an African artist. Veteran Nigerian musician 2Baba, appearing on the Mic On Podcast in February 2026, placed Burna Boy “at the top of the chain” in the current Afrobeats hierarchy.

Beyond the Big 3, a constellation of artists has expanded the genre range, geography, and commercial reach, each bringing distinct aesthetics to an increasingly plural sound.

The commercial data tells a story that would have seemed improbable in the Lagos clubs of 1975. According to a PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) report, Afrobeats contributes approximately USD2 billion annually to the global music industry, itself estimated to be worth USD26 billion. That figure represents a genre that, a generation ago, did not appear in a single Western industry report.

Streaming numbers amplify that picture. Afrobeats was streamed more than 14 billion times on Spotify in 2023, with global streams growing a further 34% in 2024, according to Spotify own data. Between 2017 and 2022, streams on Spotify increased by 550%. In 2025, Spotify reported Afrobeats streams in Latin America had surged more than 400% since 2020, with Brazil alone recording a 500% spike — a data point that illustrated both the genre truly international reach and the increasingly complex economics of streaming geography.

Nigerian artists specifically earned a record ₦58 billion (approximately USD37.8 million) in Spotify royalties in 2024 — more than double their 2023 earnings and roughly five times their 2022 figure. Revenue from the music industry in sub-Saharan Africa as a whole grew 22.6% in 2024, reaching USD110 million, with Nigeria exhibiting the highest growth rate on the continent. In the live performance sector, the first quarter of 2024 confirmed a 400% year-on-year increase in US show count for Afrobeats acts, according to Live Nation data, compared with roughly 40% growth for Latin music over the same period.

Burna Boy “Love, Damini” world tour attracted over 600,000 attendees across 12 countries and generated approximately USD40 million, according to Pollstar data, with a single sold-out performance at London O2 Arena generating an estimated USD10 million in revenue. The top 50 Afrobeats artists collectively generated more than USD780 million in 2024, accounting for roughly 65% of the genre total revenue, according to economic analysis by researcher Anang Tawiah.

For much of its history, the Recording Academy treated African popular music as a curiosity consigned to the “World Music” category — a label that critics noted was itself a Western construct used to contain everything that was not pop, rock, country, or hip-hop. That changed with measured but meaningful steps. Burna Boy Grammy win in 2021 was the first competitive Grammy for a Nigerian artist. Tems received multiple nominations. In 2024, the Recording Academy introduced the Best African Music Performance category — a formal institutional acknowledgment that African music could no longer be filed under a catch-all.

Tyla won the inaugural award for “Water” in February 2024, a moment that drew reactions across the continent ranging from jubilation to measured skepticism. As Nigerian writer Tilewa Kazeem noted on Grammy.com, Tyla win also reflected the uncomfortable reality that “Western influence is often necessary for African music to transcend the continent” — a critique that pointed to structural inequalities in how global institutions recognize and reward African creativity.

Then came the moment many in Lagos had waited decades for. On 31 January 2026, the Recording Academy posthumously awarded Fela Kuti a Lifetime Achievement Award alongside Chaka Khan, Cher, Carlos Santana, and Whitney Houston — making him the first African to receive the honor. The symmetry was noted widely: a man who spent his career attacking Western cultural dominance was now being absorbed into its most prestigious canon. “The recognition means the inspiration Fela has provided for over 50 years,” Afrobeats Intelligence founder Joey Akan told The Associated Press. “But Fela would have had a lot to say about the institution giving it to him.”

The most consequential critique of Afrobeats global rise is not cultural dilution — it is economic extraction. A landmark 2025 report by legal scholar Olufunmilayo B. Arewa from Harvard Law School Centre for the Study of African Societies and Economies found that while Afrobeats has scaled globally, only a fraction of the value it generates returns to local artists, producers, and African businesses. The report documented aggressive expansion of global labels into Africa — including Universal Music Group majority stake in Mavin Records and Warner Music partnership with Chocolate City — opaque royalty systems, low African ownership in publishing, touring, distribution, and licensing, and Africa status as the lowest royalty-collecting region globally despite being the source of the genre.

The economics of streaming compound this. A million streams in Brazil will not pay the same as a million in the United States, as Spotify royalty rates are tied to geography and subscription tiers. This means an African artist may dominate charts in São Paulo, Seoul, and Paris while earning a fraction of what the same streams would generate from a listener in New York. “Africa exports sound, but not yet sovereignty,” as one industry analyst put it — a formulation that has become widely cited in conversations about the genre future.

The Harvard report called for coordinated reforms including stronger intellectual property frameworks, transparent royalty reporting, regional market integration, and government-backed creative economy policy — urging Nigeria specifically to treat the music industry with “the same strategic priority previously reserved for oil and telecoms.” Nigeria government has taken some steps in this direction, including central bank forex exemptions for music export earnings, but industry observers say the structural work is only beginning.

Afrobeats in 2026 is no longer simply a Nigerian story, if it ever was. South African amapiano — built on the log-drum pulse of township electronic music — has merged with the West African groove to form a hybrid that is neither purely Afrobeats nor purely house, but something new and distinctly pan-African. South Africa Tyla, signed to Epic Records, bridges the two traditions with fluency. Ghana Amaarae, Senegal Youssou N’Dour sonic descendants, and the growing Afropop scenes in Cameroon, Ivory Coast, and the East African diaspora have all contributed to a genre whose borders are dissolving even as its commercial center expands.

TikTok has emerged as the primary discovery platform for rising Afrobeats artists, driving 38% of discovery for artists in the genre top 50, according to market analysis. Collaborations with Western artists — present in 55% of the top 50 biggest hits in 2024, up from 28% in 2020 — have become standard practice, raising ongoing debates about authenticity and crossover strategy. Meanwhile, Afro Nation, the touring music festival launched in Portugal in 2019, has grown into one of the world most commercially significant music festivals, with editions in Ghana, Puerto Rico, and the United Kingdom drawing combined attendances in the hundreds of thousands.

The industry internal geography is shifting, too. London remains the genre most important diaspora hub — a city where Afrobeats sold out Wembley Stadium and the O2 Arena in the same calendar year — but New York, Toronto, Paris, and increasingly Accra and Nairobi are asserting themselves as creative and commercial centers in their own right. Spotify editorial playlist “African Heat” and “Afrobeats Hits” have become global gateways to the genre, while Audiomack, the music platform most embedded in African markets, reported 58 billion Afrobeats streams in Nigeria alone since 2020.

There is a version of this story that frames Afrobeats global rise as a surprise — an unlikely export from a continent long marginalized in the global culture industry. That framing misreads the history. Fela Kuti always believed his music was for everyone. He said, repeatedly and defiantly, that the music of Africa “is a big sound — the sound of a community.” He was arrested and beaten for that belief. His community was, ultimately, the world.

What has changed is not the ambition or the talent — Lagos has always had both in abundance — but the infrastructure. Smartphones, affordable home recording software, streaming platforms indifferent to geography, and social media algorithms that can turn a song recorded in a rented studio in Surulere into a global phenomenon overnight have collectively dismantled the gatekeeping mechanisms that kept African music from reaching its natural audience for decades. What was once a structural barrier is now, increasingly, a structural advantage: a continent of 1.4 billion people, a median age of 19, and a music culture of extraordinary depth and diversity is now plugged directly into the global distribution network.

The next chapter is being written now, by Ayra Starr and Asake and a generation of artists who grew up streaming Wizkid and Burna Boy the way an earlier generation grew up listening to Fela on pirated cassettes. Some will break through. Some will not. All of them are making music in the knowledge that the world is listening — and that a man from Lagos, who once had his house burned down for playing too loudly, helped make that possible.