Afrobeats: Online archive launched to document ‘one of Africa’s biggest cultural exports’

A dedicated site has been launched to document and track Afrobeats, the wildly popular musical style from West Africa whose popularity now spans across Africa, Europe, and the Americas.

With origins in Nigeria and Ghana, Afrobeats is one of the continent’s biggest cultural exports and is currently taking the world by storm.

And in Kenya, the case is the same; at the close of 2022, data released by the music streaming platform Spotify showed that Afrobeats swept all the Top 10 spots in the Most streamed songs.

The new site dubbed ‘Afrobeats: Journey of a Billion Streams’, was launched by Spotify to act as a repository for this cultural phenomenon housing text, infographics and visual elements.

It will comprise streaming data and results from the Spotify-commissioned April 2023 Afrobeats survey. The survey, conducted by research firm Kuvora, tracks the rise of Afrobeats and its cultural impact over decades.

The company said the site will be updated on a biweekly basis for the next 8 weeks but will remain active beyond this as an always-on resource, with frequent updates on new Afrobeats moments.

It will also include an interactive experience for fans to discover and connect with new knowledge on Afrobeats.

“There is no doubt that Afrobeats as a genre is here to stay, and will only continue to shatter more ceilings. This year alone, the genre has been played for more than 223 million hours with streams exceeding 7.1 billion on Spotify. We created this site for both old and new fans of the genre, who would like to have a better understanding of how and where this explosive sound came to be,” Jocelyne Muhutu-Remy, Spotify’s Managing Director for Sub-Saharan Africa, said.

‘Origins’, the first instalment exploring the genres that acted as precursors of Afrobeats as we know it, including Afrobeat, Highlife and Juju, is currently live at afrobeats.byspotify.com.

Spotify data shows Afrobeats has grown by 550% since 2017 and it was streamed more than 13 billion times in 2022.

Data from Google shows that Kenyans have been overwhelmingly consuming a lot of West African music in recent months, with the most searched lyrics being Afrobeats songs.

Some of the most popular Afrobeats stars in Kenya are Ayra Starr, Burna Boy, Rema, Teni, Pheelz, Oxlade, Ruger and Omah Lay, among others.