There was a time when Nigerian pop music needed to maintain domestic relevance. Now, it needs a distinction. Riding on the umbrella term “Afrobeats”, the music has become one of the most recognisable genres in global music. After its conquest in gaining local dominance, it fought through to become a global cultural export. From dominating streaming platforms, global festivals, award categories, international charts, and propagating conversations about African culture, the success is undeniable.

Yet beneath this un-declining success, there’s an uncomfortable truth that has engulfed the music: the more successful Afrobeats has become as a global category for African pop music, the less useful it is starting to feel as a description of the music itself.

At what point does an umbrella term become too large for the culture and the artists who emerge from the continent where this genre emanates from? And if Afrobeats is too broad, is the solution really to create an endless collection of tags to suffice as sub-genres?

The Problem With Naming Everything Afrobeats

Part of Afrobeats’ appeal has always been its dynamic composition. Unlike other genres with rigid sonic rules, contemporary Afrobeats absorbs influences from highlife, Fuji, R&B, hip-hop, dancehall, pop and other musical traditions. The “Afrobeats” of the early 2000s isn’t exactly the Afrobeats of today. Its evolution has been one of its greatest strengths.

But somewhere along the way, that elasticity became generalisation. For the global audience, Afrobeats quickly became shorthand for a vast amount of contemporary African popular music. The distinction between Nigerian or Ghanaian pop music, South African sounds and other African traditions would blur once the music entered the international marketplace.

But Did African Music Ever Needed a Label?

At a point where African (pop) music started to gain dominance across the diaspora, international audiences needed entry points. It was easier to tell a foreigner unfamiliar with contemporary Nigerian music to listen to Afrobeats than to immediately explain the history, geography and sonic distinctions between every Nigerian or African musical tradition.

So in every sense, the hypernym has been a doorway. But if everything is Afrobeats, then the qualities we use to assess Afrobeats begin to become the qualities we use to assess African music generally. And one where every artist is forced to identify with it.

Nigeria alone contains an enormous range of languages, cultures, histories and musical traditions. So when every contemporary sound becomes “Afrobeats,” something gets lost—not necessarily from the music itself, but from the way we talk about and evaluate it.

Then We Started Creating More “Afro-” Genres

However, once artists began to deter from the generalisation of Afrobeats, the natural response was to become more specific with the use of tags. While artists like Wizkid have unapologetically distanced themselves from the name, other artists have used tags to identify their kind of music.

"AfroRave is my own perception of Afrobeats"

– REMA pic.twitter.com/tldtFadUhx

— @𝗼𝗻𝗲𝗷𝗼𝗯𝗹𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗯𝗼𝘆 (@OneJoblessBoy) September 16, 2022

Global star Rema in his early days, identified with Afro-rave. CKay stuck to his Emo-Afrobeats, which ultimately paved the way for his global penetration. Fireboy, upon his rising, distanced himself from Afrobeats and embraced Afro-life. And increasingly specific descriptors such as the recent tag YoruPop by rising artist Solana have also emerged.

YORUPOP TO THE WORLD
Sounds from the west pic.twitter.com/XdPhkbglcz

— badgalsolana (@solana_tii) June 21, 2026

Some of these distinctions are meaningful and useful as artistic or sonic branding. Afro-Adura, for instance, has been an undeniable marker for some Street-hop acts. The problem is that these tags begin to function as if they are genres— similar to how the broad Afrobeats label becomes the only lens through which African music is evaluated.

In a bid to escape one giant box, we’re creating several smaller ones. We (artists and audience) are becoming increasingly obsessed with categorising every evolution of African music before allowing it enough time to simply exist and be distinct. It feels as though the original genre is the default and the African version needs a label attached to it to become legible or appreciated by Westerners.

Afrobeats Is Not The Villain

While it feels like Afrobeats has become difficult to reclaim or redefine, artists aren’t entirely responsible. Journalists, publicists, record labels, media outlets and the audience have all participated in making the word what it is.

Yes, the name was a name we adopted from the diaspora to give Nigerian pop music a recognisable global identity. It created a shared vocabulary through which international audiences could begin engaging with contemporary West African music.

Yet, all hands must be on deck to deliberately preserve context and nuances of African contemporary music. We must understand that specificity doesn’t necessarily hurt commercial appeal for every release. And essentially, the audiences have to become comfortable with the idea that not every African song needs to sound—or be described—as the same thing.

“I’m not an Afrobeats artist. When I release my music, I classify it as R&B, but blogs keep calling it Afrobeats. I’ve noticed that any music that comes out of Africa is automatically categorized as Afrobeats.”

— Tems pic.twitter.com/YEsKkCdT0a

— carter🌚 (@carter8f) August 31, 2026

So when some African artists, or the alté and R&B-leaning artists like Tems, distinguished their sound from Afrobeats, it is beyond a refusal to be boxed. Yes, she has released different Afrobeats songs and has won a Grammy Award for one with “Love Me, Jeje.” But is that her core artistry?

Maybe Afrobeats Is Suffering From Its Success

The Nigerian music scene and Africa at large is too diverse for one word to adequately describe everything happening inside it. Afrobeats gave the world a way into African music. Now, as that audience gets bigger, the onus falls on us to teach it how to listen and accurately understand the narrative beyond the umbrella.

Because the irony of Afrobeats’ global success is that the more the world listens to African music, the more important it becomes that we teach the world how to hear the differences.

But would it make a difference if we all decided to change the narrative?