Why Is Tyla Still Being Labeled Afrobeats?
At the 2025 American Music Awards, Tyla was announced the winner of the Favorite Afrobeats Artist category, beating out genre heavyweights like Asake, Rema, Tems, and Wizkid. But while the win marks another high point in Tyla’s meteoric rise, it reignites an all-too-familiar frustration in the African music community: the persistent mislabeling of artists simply because they’re African.
Tyla doesn’t make music sonically that would place her within the Afrobeats genre, at least not all her latest works have. Her music leans more into sultry R&B and rhythmic pop, often tinged with the bounce of amapiano, a genre that originated in her home country. Her aesthetic, vocal stylings, and even production choices make it clear she’s navigating a space far removed from Nigeria’s Afrobeats tradition. Still, because she’s African, she’s boxed into a genre that doesn’t reflect her actual sound.
This isn’t just speculation; it’s something Tyla herself has addressed. During her speech at the 2024 MTV Video Music Awards, she said:
“I know there’s a tendency to group all African artists under Afrobeats. Even though Afrobeats has run things and has opened so many doors for us, African music is so diverse.”
The issue here isn’t just about semantics. It’s about lazy categorization; how the West continues to view African music through a singular lens, flattening its vast sonic diversity into the catch-all term Afrobeats. It ignores the nuance. It ignores the regional differences. And it ultimately erases the work of artists who have built and defined these genres from the ground up.
To be clear, Afrobeats is a West African phenomenon, driven by artists like Burna Boy, Wizkid, Davido, and now newer voices like Rema and Asake. Its core is rooted in Nigerian pop: lush percussion, melodious chants, streetwise lyricism, and Afrocentric pride. Tyla’s music, while undeniably African, does not operate in this framework. She’s more aligned with the global R&B wave, with influences pulled from amapiano and South African house.
This kind of misplacement doesn’t just misrepresent Tyla; it disrespects the integrity of Afrobeats as a genre. It also harms other genres from the continent, which are rarely given the spotlight they deserve. Amapiano is thriving. But to the global music industry, it’s all Afrobeats.
There’s also the deeper implication that any African artist making waves must be riding the Afrobeats train. It reinforces a one-size-fits-all narrative, where the continent’s artistic output is painted with one broad, often vague, brush. Tyla’s success should be a win for South African pop, for modern R&B, and for amapiano-adjacent artists. Instead, her win is being used to represent a genre she’s not really a part of.
