Afrobeats to the World was a movement that had strong interest from important places, and that sped up its journey from scenic impact to intercontinental recognition.
By Emmanuel Esomnofu
In 2011, when Wizkid sang the words “my music travel no visa”, he wouldn’t have thought he referenced the era’s sense of pride. Emerging from the 2000s when Afrobeats relied heavily on American influences (cue the P-Square samples and video styles), a stronger Nigerian identity was opening up within the music in that decade. The sonic references were indigenous formulations like Highlife and Fuji, and the lyricism was inclusively local, bridging several elements of our contemporary existence. The music could indeed travel without a visa because it was good and marketed even better.
Afrobeats to the World was a movement that had strong interest from important places, and that sped up its journey from scenic impact to intercontinental recognition. Admittedly, this was not our first rodeo: the 1980s spawned the interest in ‘World Music’, where artistes like Ali Farka Toure, Miriam Makeba and King Sunny Ade became global superstars. Nollywood also went global in the following decade and hit its peak in the 2000s.
However, when one goes back to study both eras and their key developments, it’s clearer to track the African influence within previous artistic work and how it intersects with the larger society. Engaging ideologically with the creators’ incentive, we see that the work was possible because the creators and executives never allowed themselves to stray far from the source of the work. Even American and European executives who worked for record labels like PolyGram and EMI would live in African cities for long stretches, keeping their boots to the ground while providing support for the artistes.
It was never more apparent the level of detail and dedication that went into vintage African production than last year, when I visited my family’s country home in Anambra State. There, I found hundreds of vinyl covers which my father gathered during his time as a young family man in Lagos. A lover of Highlife and its nearby genres, the albums I saw then included artistes from Nigeria, Ghana, Congo, Cameroon, and even Guinea-Bissau. On the covers, one found intricate artwork which blended myth and the artiste’s vision, often including a written text explaining some aspects of the presented work.
You flipped the vinyl in your hands, from front to back, and you felt an entire world contained within its physical state. To put that disk into a player would be to enter into that world, sit amongst its grandeur and be reminded of something deeper than music. Nowadays, vinyls are barely available for the African listener based in Africa, and the ready-made excuse would be their lack of commercial prospects. This begs the question: what have we done with all of Afrobeats’ pecuniary gains over the past few years, beyond the flash, glitz and celebrity life?
From a culture journalist’s perspective, preserving the essence of musical traditions is key. But also important is opening one’s mind to the currents of the contemporary climate, wherein we gauge what is working through a keen insight into what we’ve been doing. Anyone who maintains more than a minute interest in the affairs of African mainstream music—mostly called Afrobeats—would know that for years now, the conversation about the movement is a return to the home-front. To reverse the psychological and institutional factors that make its biggest artistes so eager to dominate the international sphere, at the cost of homeward impact.
I’d posit here that the lack of respect with which the genre has treated its own is ironically the same reason why it holds no true influence at the tables where it matters. That is why a Burna Boy can dismiss his Nigerian streams for a lack of financial worth, and at the same time canonise Seyi Tinubu as a great person. Between the All Progressives Congress (APC) and Bola Tinubu’s government, one can draw a straight line as to how Nigerians became so impoverished, and how our spending power has greatly diminished that supporting artistes is an afterthought.
In a globalised world where there is a lot of connection between things and people, we have an industry that has not bothered to gauge its importance beyond its feeder role. The Afrobeats Dream used to be pretty straightforward: make music from an obscure part of the world, attract the attention of a big artiste or executive, get signed and drop some hits, go global—with global success being the end of this dream. And with Nigeria being a country so intrinsically linked with Japa, and also a de facto leader of Afrobeats—it is quite ingrained in the subconscious to see the other side as, not only greener, but essentially better and more important.
When Amapiano looked set to become the African sound of the 2020s, it was telling how quickly Nigerians rushed to the scene of the latest wave. Some even tried to distort its history, much to the chagrin of socially astute South Africans, who were relentless in their claim to the sound. While it is not the first time Nigeria has co-opted other countries’ sounds, in the past they brought the music home and engaged thoughtfully and practically with it. We explored the music within our own social experiences and tweaked it to suit our unique dispositions. These days, the music is treated as exotically as possible, listened to in the studios and lifted as it was originally made.
For a while it has seemed that mainstream Nigerian music—and Afrobeats by extension—has become so mechanically inspired and produced that it is failing to connect. From this rubble, we have seen young artistes arrive on the scene who are increasingly experimental and niche-driven, catering to little blocks of audiences rather than seeking that long global push.
Elsewhere, I have argued that the penchant of artistes today to create their own sound and lingo has to do with a lack of cross-generational interest within the music industry. An essential chain of influence has been broken, and now tradition is being remodelled, shaped by the fire of the zeitgeist. However, that isn’t the full story.
For Enemuwa Dafe, a music manager and executive based in Lagos, this new approach is necessary because of a shift in where funding comes from in Afrobeats. “I don’t think Afrobeats is regressing; I think Afrobeats has plateaued”, he says. “The Afrobeats to the World movement from 2017 to 2023 was fuelled by investor funds and foreign labels, particularly putting a lot of money into seeing Afrobeats as a genre grow. Many artistes got deals and, unfortunately, have not been able to recoup. So the conversation is, ‘What justification do we have to keep putting up investment funds for artistes from this region?’ For many of these investors, there is no justification, so that pool has kind of shrunk.”
He argues that rather than a talent deficit, it is a matter of marketing. “Somebody like Tyla can have access to budgets and push their songs because they are viable in the markets that matter,” he says. “Nigeria, for instance, is not a market that can stand beside the American market or the Asian market. A song can be big but not valuable; that is how catalogue and publishing works, so it has been a question that investors and foreign labels have had to answer for themselves.”
On what can be improved within the local industry, he makes a case for the deliberate usage of data. “We must identify the fact that the crowd can be ignorant but your fans are sensible,” he says. “What this means is that the general public may not understand you; it is one thing to go for visibility. If you’re selling something that requires you getting revenue, it is not a very smart thing to optimise for visibility alone. Instead, you should look at conversion.”
Using such metrics, it bodes that artistes and their teams will have to work smarter than harder. Where foreign validation used to be a key metric, now one must play closer to their home-front, servicing the audience that shows the most affinity for their work. This would mean that an artiste like Mavo or Zaylevelten, who makes music closer to the realities of young people in Nigeria, will inherently be favoured by them. And we have seen how intentional they are about campus events and impromptu shows, cashing in on speed and execution, while the first generation of ‘Afrobeats to the World’ artistes have gone under the radar or are pushing their music passively.
“Afrobeats artistes should look inwards: what is my major market? An artiste like Tems has figured that out; her market is in the US, she targets the US”, says Dafe. “I think many artistes are lost in the idea of doing everything; everybody that can hear us should hear us. You’re not working with data. If my market is in Port Harcourt, for instance, then it is unwise for me to be targeting the Lagos market. I think a lot of artistes should work with data going forward. It is the only way we can get out of this. Know where your market is, focus on your market.”
These are salient points made, and as someone who loves and breathes African music, I am curious to see how our artistes will work themselves out of these challenging times. What won’t be lost, I would wager, is the vitality within the music which, as long as there will be artistes who place their African experiences above all else, will always find expression, no matter how ghastly the wars of economics and commerce present. So when someone asks you what is next for Afrobeats, tell them to just press play. Sometimes that is enough.
*This essay, among other cultural essays, is published in The Afrocritik Report 2025. Download the report here.
Emmanuel Esomnofu is a Nigerian writer and culture journalist. He was awarded ‘Best Writer of 2024’ by The Republic and was named among the ‘30 Under 30 Power Players in Nigerian Music’ by Turntable. He’s working on his debut manuscript.