South African artist Tyla won big at the 2024 Billboard Music Awards, securing two key accolades in the Afrobeats category: Top Afrobeats Artist and Top Afrobeats Song for her global hit, Water, but her victory raises pointed questions about representation, categorization, and the identity of Afrobeats.
At its core, the Billboard Awards are a numbers game, with winners determined by metrics such as streams, sales, radio play, and chart performance. Tyla’s Water dominated these metrics, making her win almost inevitable. However, this doesn’t take away from a deeper issue: the flattening of African music into the broad “Afrobeats” label, a problem that extends from awards shows to the charts themselves.
On Billboard’s U.S. Afrobeats Songs Chart, artists from diverse African genres are lumped together under the Afrobeats banner, erasing the distinctions between Nigeria’s Afrobeats, South Africa’s Amapiano, and other unique styles. Tyla’s music, heavily influenced by Amapiano, is categorized as Afrobeats simply because global platforms lack the nuance to differentiate.
Afrobeats is undeniably a Nigerian invention, rooted in the creativity of artists like Burna Boy, Wizkid, and Davido. Yet, at one of the world’s most prominent music awards, the torch was passed to a South African artist whose sound represents a fusion of styles rather than traditional Afrobeats. While moments like this is a testament to the genre’s worldwide impact, it also raises the question: Has the global music industry’s broad-stroke approach diluted the genre’s Nigerian identity?
