When South African star Tyla accepted the MTV Video Music Award for Best Afrobeats in 2024, the moment was supposed to be a celebration of African music’s growing global reach.
Instead, her speech became a pointed appeal for the industry to recognise what she believes is being lost in that success.
“This is such a big moment for African music. The global impact of Water,” she said, referring to her international hit, “proves that African music can be pop music.”
But Tyla soon shifted from celebration to concern.
“There’s a tendency to group all African music as Afrobeats,” she said. “Even though Afrobeats has opened so many doors for us, African music is so diverse. I come from South Africa, I represent amapiano.”
Her intervention captured a growing debate within African music: whether the Afrobeats label, once an effective gateway for African sounds into international markets, has become too broad to accurately describe the continent's increasingly diverse musical landscape.
The irony was not lost on Tyla. Despite her objection, she later won another Afrobeats award at the American Music Awards.
She is far from alone in questioning the label.
Nigerian singer Tems has resisted being categorised simply as an Afrobeats artist, describing her music instead as a combination of “Afro, R&B, soul and alternative elements”.
Burna Boy has similarly embraced the term Afrofusion to describe his music, which draws from a wide range of influences. Wizkid, CKay, King Promise and Davido have also expressed discomfort with the Afrobeats tag.
Yet the label remains firmly embedded in the international music industry.
How ‘Afrobeats’ Became the Umbrella
The term emerged in the early 2010s as a way of describing contemporary popular music coming largely from West Africa.
Its origins are distinct from Fela Kuti's Afrobeat, the politically charged Nigerian musical tradition pioneered by the legendary musician. London-based DJ Abrantee is credited, according to reporting by the Guardian, with adding an “s” to create “Afrobeats” — a useful distinction for a new generation of African pop music being marketed to European audiences.
The label proved commercially powerful.
As streaming transformed the music industry and African artists increasingly reached international audiences, Afrobeats became a convenient shorthand for music from a continent whose sounds were often unfamiliar to Western listeners.
But that convenience has increasingly come at a cost.
Hits such as Tyla's Water, Rema's Calm Down and Moliy's Shake It to the Max have helped propel African music into the global mainstream. At the same time, Afrobeats has increasingly been used to describe music that encompasses pop, dance, rap, R&B, gospel, highlife and alternative sounds from across the continent.
Grammy-winning Nigerian producer and singer Bloody Civilian, who is scheduled to tour with Tyla, considers the categorisation restrictive.
She describes the label as “deeply limiting” and questions “confusing that westerners continue to box the numerous ways Africans experiment with sound”.
One Continent, One Genre?
The problem, critics argue, is not simply terminology.
Western music is routinely divided into dozens of genres and subgenres, allowing audiences to distinguish between musical traditions, regional movements and emerging sounds.
African music, by contrast, is frequently placed under a single commercial umbrella.
That can make it easier for international audiences to discover African artists, but it can also obscure the cultural histories and musical distinctions behind their work.
The consequences are particularly significant in West Africa, where musicians and producers continue to develop new sounds that can struggle to gain recognition as independent genres.
One example is Mr Eazi's banku music.
The Nigerian artist, who attended university in Ghana, developed the style by combining elements of Nigerian pop with Ghanaian highlife. By 2015, his relaxed, atmospheric music had become enormously popular across West Africa.
Banku music developed characteristics associated with a genre: a laid-back tempo, a distinctive four-stroke kick-drum pattern and an identifiable visual culture.
Other artists, including Runtown and Tekno, incorporated elements of its sound into their own music. University students across the region even adopted aspects of Mr Eazi's distinctive fashion, including straw hats and dashikis.
Yet banku music did not develop into the lasting cultural movement that some believed it could become.
The Genres That Disappear
The experience illustrates a broader problem.
Without sustained documentation, critical attention and cultural investment, emerging musical styles can become temporary trends rather than established traditions.
Banku music is not alone. Other sounds and movements, including azonto, zanku, cruise and afropiano, have similarly struggled to establish themselves as enduring musical identities.
Culture journalist Tiléwa Kazeem argues that international media frequently regard emerging African genres as “esoteric”.
Afrobeats, he says, “has not just obscured other genres but also affected their documentation”.
That absence of documentation matters.
Genres do not become culturally significant simply because a song becomes popular. They need histories, communities, artists, terminology and institutions that preserve and develop them.
In the West, genres such as grunge and hyperpop have been supported by extensive media coverage, fan communities and cultural documentation. African musical movements often face a different challenge: their complexity can be reduced to a single commercially recognisable label before their individual identities have time to develop.
The Industry’s Role
The responsibility does not rest solely with Western media.
African music companies, artists, journalists, award organisers and audiences also play a role in determining how the continent's music is presented.
The contradiction is particularly apparent when artists object to the Afrobeats label but continue to accept its commercial advantages.
“There’s a tension between culture and commerce,” culture writer Dennis Ade Peter says. “Afrobeats artists and stakeholders routinely rail against the term, but still market their music as Afrobeats and validate awards and events where their music is described as such; it’s paradoxical.”
The commercial incentive is obvious. Afrobeats is now an internationally recognisable brand, and being placed within that category can help artists gain access to audiences, playlists, awards and marketing budgets.
But the same success can make it harder for less established genres to secure attention.
Building the Next Generation of Genres
New sounds are nevertheless continuing to emerge.
Among them are afro adura, which draws on spiritual and religious influences, and mara, an energetic blend of street pop and electronic music.
The challenge is turning these sounds from fleeting trends into identifiable cultural movements.
“There has to be enough documentation, enough lore, enough intentionality around them,” says Dolapo Amusat, founder of Nigerian music and creative network WeTalkSound.
“Mara is a good example of what that can look like when people who genuinely care about the sound start building substantial identities so these sounds can stand on their own.”
That requires more than artists producing music. It means journalists documenting movements, producers developing distinctive sounds, labels investing in new artists, historians preserving their origins and audiences giving emerging genres time to mature.
The international music industry also has a role.
The decision to remove the Afrobeats category from the MTV VMAs this year did not resolve the underlying question. Instead, it left the awards without an African music category altogether.
For critics of the old system, that is another indication of how poorly international institutions understand the diversity of African music.
But the challenge extends beyond Western institutions. African media outlets, already accustomed to the commercial dominance of Afrobeats, can also hesitate to devote serious coverage to emerging sounds they regard as difficult to define.
Giving African Music Room to Evolve
There is a historical precedent for allowing African musicians to create rather than simply conform to an existing commercial category.
Artists such as Fela Kuti and King Sunny Adé developed distinctive musical traditions that went on to influence generations of musicians and shape perceptions of African music around the world.
The new generation is similarly experimenting, blending influences and creating sounds that do not always fit neatly into established categories.
The question now is whether the industry will give those sounds enough room to develop.
Afrobeats undeniably helped open international doors for African musicians. Its success created a powerful global platform at a time when many African artists struggled to gain mainstream recognition outside the continent.
But a platform can become a ceiling if it is allowed to define everything that comes after it.
The next phase of African music's global expansion may therefore depend not on finding another umbrella term, but on allowing artists to name, develop and document their own sounds.
As African music continues to travel around the world, its greatest strength may ultimately lie in refusing to sound like just one thing.