When the South African singer Tyla took the Grammy stage to accept the first-ever award for best African music performance in 2024, it felt as if the stars had finally aligned for pop music of the continent. The movement had produced an it-girl avatar who seemed to be blossoming into a megastar, and who stood as a spark plug for broader expansionist ambitions. "I'd never thought I'd say I'm a Grammy winner at 22 years old," Tyla said, before introducing herself to those in the crowd who might not have heard of her. But she closed her remarks with a bird's-eye view of the moment: "Thank you to the Recording Academy for this category. It's so important."
If the establishment of a space specifically for African music could be read as long-overdue institutional acceptance for the music of the region, the inaugural winner of the trophy was telling a different story about how and why it was brought into being. Her competitors for the award were all products of Nigeria — the country that, in the decade prior, had set an international baseline for African pop music under the contested banner Afrobeats. South Africa's contribution to the continental pop sound, amapiano, was steadily being integrated into its Afrobeats counterpart, and now Tyla stood as a shining beacon of that synergy. It may have been an unfair expectation, but her win cast her as a weather vane for the music's sound and status.
After a two-year buildup that included a race controversy, a Coke commercial, several Met Gala looks and a second Grammy in the category she'd christened, Tyla returned this summer with A*Pop, the follow-up to her 2023 debut. The title made her intentions clear, but she spelled it out for anyone not getting it in an interview with Billboard Africa. "I've always wanted to be this pop star, but I hated feeling like I had to tailor myself to pop. I wanted to tailor pop to me instead," she said. "I bring the 'A' to pop, it's African pop. African music is pop music."
In the years leading to Tyla's breakthrough, it seemed the American music industry was accepting that premise only reluctantly. Her rise signaled a recentering of the mainstream network, as artists across the pop landscape felt the touch of her influence. But Tyla returns to a different landscape than the one she entered, the crossover outlook for Afro-pop having narrowed considerably. A*Pop led the charge amid a slate of summer Afro-pop releases from buzzmakers now retaking the cultural temperature. When taken together, they tell a story of the state of the genre, its health and prospects. Gauging the success of the expansion effort may depend on how one measures the strides taken toward globalization.
Afro-pop as we currently recognize it — as a scene acknowledged by both stakeholders and outsiders, an industry with its own functionality, and a loose organizer of sounds that falls just short of a genre — has really only existed for two decades. The greatest strides were made in the mid-2010s, as artists such as Wizkid, Davido, Tiwa Savage, Burna Boy and Olamide began pulling an aesthetic into focus. ("Afrobeats" was decisively separated from "Afrobeat," the funk music pioneered by Fela Kuti, during this period.) Its most impactful stylistic innovation was an improved sonic network, modernizing earlier iterations of pop music from West Africa — highlife, juju, galala — and plugging those diasporic LAN cables into Western pop. (Some of this was the result of on-the-ground cultural exchange: Davido went to college in Alabama before dropping out to pursue music full-time; Tiwa and Burna Boy studied in England.)
It didn't take long for American labels to notice. Davido signed with Sony in 2016, Wizkid and Burna Boy went to RCA and Atlantic in 2017, and suddenly, the gold rush was on. Warner struck a partnership deal with the Nigerian label Chocolate City Entertainment in 2019. The same year, Universal Music Group licensed its catalog to the Nigerian streaming service Udux and signed Tiwa; in 2020 it started the sublabel Def Jam Africa. In 2022, the independent distributor Empire launched Empire Africa.
Industry recognition coincided with commercial breakthroughs. "Essence," Wizkid's slow-burning pandemic hit with singer Tems, reached the Top 10 of the Hot 100, and in summer 2022 set a record as the first song to spend an entire year in the Top 10 of the R&B/Hip-Hop airplay chart. That distinction showed the extent of the song's American reach, but also the limits: Neither hip-hop nor R&B, it had been shoehorned into established "urban" formats. In the middle of the song's run, Billboard sought to adjust for this discrepancy by launching the U.S. Afrobeats chart. But soon after, the next-gen superstar Rema fully one-upped "Essence" with 2023's "Calm Down," which landed at No. 3 on the Hot 100 with some help from Selena Gomez, on its way to becoming the continent's longest-charting song ever, its first to reach a billion U.S. streams on Spotify and its most played song on U.S. radio. "We used to dream of this," Tega Oghenejobo, Rema's label COO at the foundational Afrobeats company Mavin Records, told Billboard. "But now it's time to put in work to properly represent the culture and connect with more listeners in the U.S."
By the time Tyla's "Water" peaked in early 2024, having made her the first South African to crack the Hot 100 since Hugh Masekela in 1968, it seemed the tracks were laid. That year, Universal Music Group purchased a major stake in Mavin Records, and Tyla joined a wider wave of women taking charge of the movement and making inroads into American culture. At the time, I wrote, "Ayra Starr, Tyla and Tems each feel like surefire hits in a time when fame is difficult to quantify, and all three artists releasing pivotal career albums in the span of three months is a good-sized crack along African music's glass ceiling."
Fame is even harder to quantify now. But Tems, for one, has only continued to ascend, becoming the first Nigerian to win multiple Grammys in 2025 and scoring a U.K. chart-topper with her Dave collaboration "Raindance" the same year. Tyla's "Push 2 Start" went platinum, and the A*Pop single "Chanel" went gold. Still, things have definitely cooled off since that hot start. Afro-pop songs have largely been crowded out of the Top 40 in the last few years, and the U.S. Afrobeats chart has grown static: On its 2025 year-end list, "Water," "Push 2 Start" and "Calm Down" were still hanging around the upper reaches.
Which is to say: The Afro-pop takeover of the American market never fully manifested, at least not the way it has for K-pop. There are many reasons for the economic disparity, not least the ways that colorism amplifies xenophobia — but Afro-pop also isn't optimized for social engagement and video-powered feeds in the same way. It's worth noting the difference in ground covered, too: The space of that "K" represents a nation, while Afro-pop has to speak for several. (There have long been secondary conversations about West Africa being overrepresented in the formula: Apart from Tyla and a random Chris Brown appearance, the best African music performance category has only ever had one nominee who wasn't from Nigeria, a concentration of power that distorts the full picture.) If "Water" winning the inaugural African Grammy felt like floodgates opening, Tyla's 2026 win for a cut from the deluxe edition of the same album feels like stagnancy setting in.
A music genre is not its place in the market, but market factors obviously influence the way music takes shape — especially when an influx of capital creates pressure to yield returns — and you can feel Afro-pop responding to those pressures in the wake of its initial uprising. It's possible the form simply hasn't had its Kpop Demon Hunters moment yet; just because the bets haven't totally panned out doesn't mean they never will. But more importantly, as artists from across Afro-pop's current spectrum are demonstrating, real progress is marked by chasing and meeting creative benchmarks ahead of commercial ones.
There are few artists who wholly embrace Afrobeats as a title, fewer who can claim to embody its sound, and fewer still who can say they've made it synonymous with African pop, but Davido is at the center of that Venn diagram. He pitched his July album, Oriadé — which translates to "the head that wears the crown" and suggests the embrace of a royal destiny — as a tribute to his journey. The music bounces from the gleaming, R&B-infused sound he initially refined ("Julie") to the stamping bop of the '10s ("I Know Who I Be") to the shuddery amapiano he has donned later in his career ("Gimme Dat Ting"). If the first sign of a robust music scene is space for its veteran class to recede into legacy status, then Oriadé is a measure of good standing: a deliberate charting of the path he has both walked and paved.
In the songs of CKay — a child of the Afrobeats offshoot Alté, which brought a more experimental edge to the music — one can sense how genres within the Afro-pop array have developed in the years since the stateside push. His swooning viral hit "Love Nwantiti" was the first No. 1 on the Billboard Afrobeats chart when it debuted in 2022, and that song and its similarly muted follow-up, "Emiliana," outlined a more understated take on the throbbing, polyrhythmic Nigerian pop palette, sashaying music possessed by a loverboy energy. So there's no mistaking his appetite for change on the album he released last month, BANGER BOY, whose opening notes suggest his usual fare until the drums suddenly crackle off like sparklers, igniting an anxious song in which he can't save a woman who "belongs to the streets." The energy only amps up from there: "Foreplay is a formality for the action," he snaps on the springy "SHEGE." "Give me body, I go give you satisfaction." The cover depicts him lighting a giant firework on the beach, as he moves his music in more propulsive and brazen directions. There is clearly a desire to lean into distinctly African songcraft while also playing toward the venues in which people gather — to follow both the natural movement of the scene and market demand for the sound.
The Ghanaian-American party gyal MOLIY demonstrates an even bolder migration to the club. Much of Afro-pop, by nature of its rhythmic complexity and intensity, is dance music, but it hasn't been expressly in conversation with EDM or rave culture until recently. MOLIY, whose Afrofusionist twerk anthem "Shake It to the Max (Fly)" found life on socials last year yoking Alté and dancehall together, has pushed the relationship further. Following her countrywoman and collaborator Amaarae's 2025 twisted Eurodance fantasy, Black Star, MOLIY invites listeners into her maximalist imagination with BADDIES <3 MOLIY, an album with a DJ's intuition that riffs on Latin dembow, amapiano, recession pop and more. Its textures hew close to synth-pop, yet its drums are insistent, almost bass-boosted. "Tometo" has a festival drop. The hook on "Bukshot" modernizes one from "Work," a 2002 soca-spinning single by the Nuyorican house duo Masters at Work. And "Popstar xoxo" feels a virtual emulation of a chintzy late-aughts ringtone hit. BADDIES <3 MOLIY sets out in search of "borderless music" — a pop that is of Africa but not bound to it — but its exploration of that open plane feels powered by a playful nature, an urge to see and do as much as humanly possible.
Which brings us full circle to Tyla — who has similar ambitions, but has lately seemed more calculating about the pursuit and less astute about the work. She has been adamant that she made A*Pop to reconceive what an African pop star is, and it's clear she seeks a fully synced experience where that "A" is a cornerstone and not a qualifier. So often, pop from the motherland is treated like a software update for American pop and not its own programming language, so it's fair for an artist to attempt to build a system from the ground up. But her efforts have been so focused on the external — how outsiders think of Africa, their relationship to her Africanness, or earning an imagined accreditation as a full-stop "pop" artist — that she has perhaps lost sight of what made her music groundbreaking in the first place.
The magic of 2024's Tyla was its finesse. As I put it then, the songs are "sweat-soaked but subtle, often sensation-driven, her vocals possessed by the breathlessness of intimacy and motion." A*Pop feels less like her, more like roleplay. To be fair, the album is a big swing worth applauding: "Right Now" isn't far from the situationship R&B of artists like Summer Walker and Kehlani, and "Feel Something" truly does sound like a vision of the genre's future, as alien as it is familiar. Just as often as she attempts to break the mold, she leans heavily into South African styles. And on songs like "Is It," "Mr. Nonchalant" and "She Did It Again," she does create another mode for herself rather successfully. But more often than not, the focus feels scattered: so intent on meeting demand that the music loses some of its character, never amounting to a complete statement for her, or African stardom, or the "A" itself.
Perhaps that's why the most hopeful vision for a sustainable Afro-pop future comes from another harbinger — Ayra Starr, Tyla's closest counterpart in the race to define what the next generation of African pop might bring. Starr and Tyla are the same age and have been active for about the same amount of time, though Starr broke out a bit sooner. The beaming 2022 single "Rush" placed her on the vanguard of the Nigerian sound, and her subsequent album, The Year I Turned 21, treated songs about self-discovery and maturing into adulthood as vehicles to display that growth curve. Starr Girl, released in August, is far more self-assured than A*Pop, and considerably less obsessive about the observer's stance. It is not trying to prove what an Afro-pop star can be; it is simply embodying one.
At the simplest level, Starr really knows her way around a hook, and she bears a rich, oaky voice that goes down like brandy. But she also has an incredible feel for where the seams of her music come together: While she continues to refine the Afrobeats design, the songs that toy with those bounds ("Tornado," "Hot Body") or venture beyond them ("Amazing," "Letter to God") never stray outside her wheelhouse or feel like forcing a square peg. The underlying tensions aren't so much sonic as cultural: She wrote in a Substack post that Starr Girl is an album about being a young African woman in America, finding yourself between two cultures, and that its music "is a bridge between past and present, tradition and transformation, self and society, accepting complexity and turning it into strength." In navigating these spaces, she has never sounded more collected or multifaceted. But it is the last part that is key: the inner informing the outer, and not vice versa.
Starr Girl didn't chart on the Billboard 200, but listening to it, that feels more like the chart's problem than the artist's. It's worth wondering if the American market should even be treated as a cultural hegemony any longer: The charts and Top 40 radio have seen less and less turnover in recent years, and grown significantly less diverse at the summit. If patterns hold and the next break never comes for Afro-pop, it will still have been worth it for all the artists leading the push, the breakthroughs made while seeking to transcend boundaries. "I do this for myself / And the people wey dey follow me for years," Starr sings on "Treasure." "I be chaser and I'm headed for the treasure." Every time I hear that lyric, I get the sense that the thing worth treasuring can't be quantified by numbers alone.
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