Using “Afrobeats” as a catch-all for African pop hides dozens of distinct genres and scenes. The label has brought attention, but it also narrows how listeners, media and industry understand the continent’s music.
Key takeaways
- Afrobeats is one genre with its own roots, but Western media and the music industry often use the word for almost any popular music from Africa.
- The Guardian reports that a South African pop star, accepting an Afrobeats award at the 2024 MTV VMAs, called the moment bittersweet because of this habit of grouping.
- Genres such as amapiano, gqom, highlife and bongo flava have separate histories, sounds and audiences, and one label hides these differences.
- Broad labels can help unfamiliar music reach new listeners, so the question is whether the industry can keep that reach while showing more of the detail.
The argument: one word is doing too much work
Afrobeats, with the “s”, is generally understood as a style of pop that grew mainly out of West Africa, especially Nigeria and Ghana, and their diasporas. It mixes local rhythms with hip-hop, dancehall and R&B, and it became widely popular around the world. It should not be confused with Afrobeat, the earlier and politically charged style of funk and jazz that came out of Nigeria decades before.
The problem is not the genre. The problem is how far its name has spread. In much Western coverage, in many award categories and on many streaming playlists, “Afrobeats” has come to mean “popular music from Africa”. A continent of 54 countries and a huge range of languages, instruments and musical traditions ends up behind one label borrowed from one regional scene.
The Guardian’s article argues that this has a cost. When everything is called Afrobeats, listeners struggle to tell styles apart, artists from outside the Afrobeats scene are judged by its standards, and the industry ends up selling a narrow idea of what African music is. The Guardian says that artists, media and the music industry should all do more to show the range of African pop. This article agrees, and sets out the evidence and the strongest objections below.
Evidence one: an award stage showed the tension
The clearest example comes from the music industry itself. The Guardian reports that in 2024 the South African singer whose single “Water” became a global hit won the best Afrobeats award at the MTV Video Music Awards. According to the Guardian, she opened her speech by celebrating what the win meant for African music and saying that the song’s success showed African music could be pop music.
The Guardian then reports that her tone changed. She called the moment bittersweet and pointed to a tendency to group all African music as Afrobeats. She acknowledged that Afrobeats had opened many doors. The rest of her remarks are cut off in the material available here, so this article does not try to reconstruct them.
The detail matters because of where her music comes from. Her sound is usually linked to South African dance and pop traditions, including amapiano, not to the West African scene where Afrobeats began. An award category named after one genre was given to an artist working largely in another. She chose to point this out from the stage, which suggests the problem is not just a complaint from critics. At least some of the artists the label is meant to celebrate feel it too.
This article does not know how the VMAs define or judge that category, or whether the award body has discussed changing it. Those details are not in the source material.
Evidence two: the genres being merged are genuinely different
The second piece of evidence is musical. The styles that end up grouped under one name do not sound alike, and they did not grow from the same places.
Amapiano grew in South Africa’s townships. It is known for deep, rolling log-drum basslines, piano melodies and long, slowly building tracks that owe a lot to house music and to the local style kwaito. Gqom, another South African style, is darker, sparser and more percussive, and is closely tied to club culture in Durban. Highlife has its roots in Ghana and Nigeria, with guitar and brass traditions that go back generations. Bongo flava in Tanzania mixes hip-hop and R&B with East African melodies and Swahili lyrics. Francophone West and Central Africa have their own dance styles, such as coupé-décalé and Congolese rumba and soukous, with their own guitar styles and dance cultures.
Each of these has its own producers, venues, dances, slang and audiences. Some depend on lyrics, some on long instrumental grooves. Some are made mainly for clubs, some for radio, some for live bands. Calling them all Afrobeats is like filing grime, Britpop and drum and bass under one British genre name. A listener who knows the scenes would find it confusing, and a newcomer would find it misleading.
The flattening also affects scenes that are not in fashion. When one label dominates, the styles that resemble it most get the attention. Styles that sound very different, or use languages and structures less familiar to Western pop listeners, are more easily ignored.
Evidence three: industry systems reward simple categories
The third piece of evidence is structural. Today’s music industry depends on categories. Streaming services sort tracks into genre tags and editorial playlists. Award shows create named categories. Retailers, booking agents and festival programmers sort acts into labelled slots. Music journalists, with limited space, often reach for the term readers already know.
Each of these systems tends to keep the categories it already has. A track tagged as Afrobeats is recommended next to other Afrobeats tracks. That strengthens the tag’s place in listeners’ minds and makes it the obvious label for the next release. Once an award category exists under one name, artists from neighbouring genres can either compete in it or go unrecognised. A newer or smaller scene has trouble getting its own label because it has not yet built the audience a label would help it reach.
This article does not have figures on how streaming services, award bodies or broadcasters actually classify African music, or on how classification affects streams or income. No such data appears in the source material, so the size of the effect is unknown. The mechanism is still clear: when systems are built around a small number of labels, those labels shape what gets heard.
The strongest case against: umbrella labels have helped African music grow
There is a serious argument on the other side, and it should be stated fairly.
First, broad labels are how the global music market has always brought unfamiliar music to new listeners. “Latin music” covers reggaeton, salsa, bachata, regional Mexican styles and much more. “K-pop” covers a wide range of sounds. Before Afrobeats spread, many Western shops and broadcasters filed music from all over Africa under the even vaguer heading of “world music”. By that standard, Afrobeats is more specific. It is also a modern, pop-focused label that does not treat African music as exotic or folkloric.
Second, the label has clearly opened doors. The Guardian’s account of the award speech itself notes that Afrobeats has created opportunities. An artist from outside the West African scene still won a major award on a large international stage, and that may not have happened if no African pop category had existed. A word that a Western audience recognises can be how listeners first find their way to the different scenes behind it. Many people who now know about amapiano may have first heard it near Afrobeats on a playlist.
Third, the distinctions might work themselves out over time. As listeners spend more time with African pop, more specific labels may spread on their own, as has happened with other genre families. On this view, the umbrella is a stage that the market is passing through, not lasting damage.
Fourth, the label is not imposed only from outside. African artists, producers and media sometimes use “Afrobeats” loosely too, because it brings bookings, playlist placements and press coverage. Blaming the West alone may oversimplify a system in which many people, including artists on the continent, have reasons to use the broad term.
These are strong points. They suggest the issue is less about whether the umbrella should exist and more about whether anything is being built beneath it.
Evidence that would change the conclusion
Several kinds of evidence could strengthen or weaken the argument made here.
If data showed that listeners who discover African music through broad Afrobeats playlists then move on to specific scenes such as amapiano, gqom or highlife, the umbrella would look more like a gateway than a barrier. If data showed that those listeners stay within a narrow set of similar-sounding tracks, the case against flattening would be stronger.
Evidence on artists’ income would also matter. If artists working outside Afrobeats earn more, tour more widely or get more coverage when they are filed under the Afrobeats label, many of them may reasonably prefer the broad term despite its flaws. If they do better once their own genre is named, the case for more specific labels becomes clearer.
What award bodies and streaming services do next would also be telling. If separate categories for distinct African genres attracted strong nominations and audiences, that would show the market can support more detail. If such categories struggled to fill places or draw attention, it would suggest the umbrella is still serving a purpose.
Finally, the views of artists and audiences on the continent should count for more than they often do. Structured surveys of how musicians and listeners in different African countries feel about the term, rather than one-off comments from award stages, would show whether the frustration the Guardian describes is widespread or limited to particular scenes. None of these figures is available in the source material for this article, so the conclusion remains open to revision.
Sources and further reading
- The Guardian, music section: the report and argument this article explains, including the account of the 2024 award speech.
- Academic ethnomusicology and popular music studies on contemporary African genres and their regional histories.
- Music trade press covering streaming categorisation, playlist curation and award category design.
- African music journalism and broadcasting from scenes such as Lagos, Accra, Johannesburg, Durban and Dar es Salaam.
Surfaced from the rss:guardian_music signal “African music genre labelling”. AI-assisted draft, editorially reviewed.
