Being invited to perform in a house is not the same as holding the deed. Right now, Afrobeats is a celebrated guest. It is not yet the landlord.
By Jummai Bulama-Ashebu
I was mid-sentence on air when the message came through. Burna Boy had sold out the O2 Arena in London. Again. I finished my link, cued the next track, and pulled off my headphones with the kind of satisfaction you feel when something you have always believed is finally being proven to the world. A colleague walked into the live studio during the break. I told him the news, still buzzing. He nodded, smiled, and then said quietly: “Imagine if he were getting paid what a British artiste at his level actually gets paid.”
The room went quiet. Not an uncomfortable silence. A thinking silence. The kind that settles over you when someone has just named something you felt but could not articulate. We went back on air thirty seconds later and said nothing more about it. But the question stayed with me. It is still with me. Because the O2 sold out. The streams are in the billions. The name is on the FIFA soundtrack. And yet something about the architecture of all that success does not quite add up. This essay is my attempt to figure out what.
When FIFA dropped the official soundtrack album for the 2026 World Cup, Nigerian Twitter did what it always does. It was celebrated. Rema was on the tracklist. So was Burna Boy. The narrative wrote itself in real time: Afrobeats had arrived on the world’s biggest sporting stage. The takeover was official.
Nobody stopped to read the full tracklist.
Alongside Rema, LISA, and Anitta on “Goals”, the 18-track album features The Rolling Stones, Shakira, Daddy Yankee, Jelly Roll, and Future. The album’s commercial centre of gravity is unmistakably Western and Latin Pop. African artistes appear on four tracks, a significant progress from previous tournaments, and worth acknowledging. But representation and architecture are different things. Being invited to perform in a house is not the same as holding the deed. Right now, Afrobeats is a celebrated guest. It is not yet the landlord.
This distinction between cultural visibility and institutional power is the question the global takeover narrative rarely asks. It should be the only question that matters.
Streaming Growth and What It Conceals
The numbers that fuel the takeover story are real and remarkable. Afrobeats listeners grew 22% globally in the past year. Between 2017 and 2023, streams on the platform grew by 550%. In Latin America, streams have increased by more than 400% since 2020, with Brazil alone recording a 500% spike.
Much of this growth originates in Africa and among diaspora communities in the UK, the US, and Canada, which have always been Afrobeats’ most loyal audience. A 500% increase in Brazilian listenership is striking. It is also growing from a very small base. Momentum is not the same as market penetration. And streaming numbers, however large, do not automatically translate into economic power for the people who make the music.
Where the Money Actually Goes
A 2025 Harvard-affiliated report by Professor Olufunmilayo Arewa confirmed that Nigerian music streams have reached over 30 billion on platforms like Spotify. Yet, structural revenue leakage continues to threaten the African music industry, with only a fraction of that value reaching Nigerian artistes, producers, and local businesses. The platforms collect. Africa receives a portion.
The “Basslines to Billions” report published in 2025 valued the Nigerian music industry at approximately ₦901 billion. Publishing the revenue stream that compounds over time through sync deals, licensing, and royalties that continue to pay long after a song leaves the charts accounted for just 0.7% of that total. Live performances, by contrast, drive 66% of all industry income, meaning the entire ecosystem depends on artistes physically showing up, night after night, city after city, to keep the money flowing.
Thirty billion streams. 0.7% in publishing. That gap is not a footnote. That is the whole story.
Publishing is the quiet infrastructure most people outside the industry never think about. It is not the concert footage or the Billboard placement. It is the money that arrives when a song plays in a hotel lobby in Copenhagen, is used to soundtrack a car commercial in Tokyo, or is cleared for a Netflix series in Los Angeles. It is how The Beatles still generate wealth for their estates. It is how Western pop artistes retire rich. And it is precisely where Nigerian music remains most structurally exposed.
The “Basslines to Billions” report described Nigeria’s publishing and licensing income as a “sleeping giant”. A sleeping giant is not a functioning one. The Collective Management Organisations responsible for tracking and collecting royalties on behalf of Nigerian artistes are still being built and reformed. Weak copyright enforcement, fragmented rights management, and limited sync pipelines mean that when an Afrobeats track lands in a global film or advertisement, the financial trail back to Lagos is often broken before it begins.
Professor Arewa’s report argues this is not accidental. Afrobeats scaled globally during a period of sweeping technological disruption, from MP3 downloads to streaming, and these shifts weakened local negotiating power precisely when the music was gaining global traction.
Major labels, which control distribution, publishing administration, and sync relationships, retain a disproportionate share of value. Africa exports the sound. The infrastructure of monetisation remains largely elsewhere. Spotify paid roughly $59 million in royalties to artistes across Nigeria and South Africa combined in 2024, a record figure, and still less than what a single mid-tier Western pop artiste can earn annually from publishing alone.
This disconnect between streaming volume and institutional reward is mirrored in the way our music is categorised by the people who decide what gets recognised.
Is the Category the Problem?
In 2024, The Recording Academy introduced the Best African Music Performance category. It was a meaningful acknowledgement, but its short history reveals something worth examining carefully.
The issue is not who has won the award. The issue is the award’s design itself. A single category for “African music” collapses an entire continent’s musical diversity Afrobeats, Amapiano, Highlife, Bongo Flava, Congolese Rumba, Afro-House into one marketable label. That is not recognition. That is a reduction. It tells you less about how deeply Western institutions understand African music and more about how they prefer to package it: one shelf, one bracket, one prize.
When the Recording Academy created this category, it did not create a Best Afrobeats Performance award or a Best West African Music award. It created a continent-wide basket and called it progress. The result is a category that structurally pits Lagos against Johannesburg, Accra against Nairobi, as though these are competing expressions of the same thing. They are not. The existence of a single African category, however well-intentioned, reveals how global institutions continue to process African musical diversity through a lens of convenient simplicity.
What Institutional Power Actually Looks Like
The honest question this essay has been building toward is not “has Afrobeats gone global?” It clearly has. The question is: what would it look like if Afrobeats actually held institutional power, and how far are we from that reality?
It would look like African-owned publishing houses administering the rights to the genre’s most valuable catalogue, not as a subsidiary arrangement with Western majors, but independently, retaining the full value chain. It would look like efficient collecting societies ensuring that every sync placement, every commercial, every streaming royalty finds its way back to the producer in Surulere and the songwriter in Mushin. It would look like Nigerian music investment funds capitalising the next generation of artistes before the Western labels arrive with better-resourced offers. It would look like export offices, the kind South Korea built for K-pop, treating Afrobeats as a strategic national asset with the same institutional seriousness previously reserved for oil revenue.
Some of this is beginning. Afreximbank has announced a $1 billion initiative to support African creative industries. Universal Music Group’s reported acquisition of a majority stake in a leading Nigerian label signals that the majors have made their valuation of the genre clear. The question is whether Nigerian institutions move fast enough to ensure that value is shared, not extracted.
The music has already done the hardest part. It has proven its worth to the world. What remains is building the architecture that converts cultural proof into durable economic and institutional power. That is not a creative challenge. It is a policy and infrastructure challenge, and it requires the same urgency we once gave to building pipelines.
The takeover is not complete. It has barely begun. And the artistes carrying this culture deserve an industry that is building toward the day it is.
Jummai Bulama-Ashebu is a media and communications professional with over seven years of broadcast experience in radio and television, currently based in Nigeria, and completing a Postgraduate Diploma in Mass Communication at Caritas University.