February is Black History Month in the U.S. and the theme for this year is “African Americans and the Arts.” This also coincides with the first award in the new category for Best African Music Performance handed out at the 2024 GRAMMYs this past Sunday, February 4th, alongside awards in two other new categories, Best Alternative Jazz Album and Best Pop Dance Recording. With Billboard and Luminate having added Afrobeats as a chart sub-genre in 2022, the time is right for the GRAMMYs to also add some official representation in this category.
Strictly by the numbers, the five nominees for Best African Music Performance – “Amapiano” by ASAKE & Olamide, “City Boys” by Burna Boy, “UNAVAILABLE” by Davido featuring Musa Keys, “Rush” by Ayra Starr, and Sunday’s GRAMMY winner “Water” by Tyla – certainly made a case for themselves across the globe. All together they’ve racked up nearly 523m Total Activity-to-Date On-Demand (Audio + Video) streams in the U.S. through the sales week ending February 1, 2024, and 2.9B Total On-Demand streams worldwide through that same time (with “Water” and “Rush” accounting for an impressive 2.1B of that total).
Luminate’s 2023 Year-End Music Report published in January showed that the top Afrobeats songs were gaining streaming share in Europe and these GRAMMY-nominated tracks reinforce that with popularity in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Netherlands, South Africa, and Australia. Additionally, India and The Philippines prove to be very strong markets for Tyla and Ayra Starr.
Interest in the African music genre is indicative of the trend toward the “multi-lingual listener” also noted in the 2023 Year-End Music Report. The streaming share of English-language content in the U.S. Top 10K tracks* has dropped 3.8% since 2021, and 63% of Gen Z and 65% of Millennials are reporting that they “listen to new music to experience new cultures and perspectives.”
In the U.S., Afrobeats was one of the fastest-growing subgenres as it jumped from 3.3B On-Demand Audio streams in 2022 to 4.9B in 2023 for a 50% increase. When translated down to the market level, the top 10 markets for the genre in 2023 were New York, Los Angeles, Washington DC, Atlanta, Dallas, Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston, Boston, and Miami edging out San Francisco-Oakland.
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*Ranked by Total On-Demand (Audio + Video) streams
