A new category at the Grammys, Best African Music Performance will be live on Sunday for African artistes.
This creation was due to the global rise of Afrobeats with TikTok being one of the catalysts for it.
Afrobeats which originated in Africa constitute Nigeria and Ghana sounds. The music genre comprises percussion and a fusion of other music genres like rap, jazz, R&B etc
Modern Afrobeats “has a feel-good groove to it,” said Heran Mamo, R&B and hip-hop reporter at Billboard magazine, which created a U.S. Afrobeats chart in 2022.
“It’s bound to reach a wider audience because it already contains a little bit of everything for everyone.”
Heran said
In 2022, Afrobeats music got 13.5 billion streams compared to 11.5 billion it got in 2017 on music platform, Spotify. Modern Afrobeats ” has a feel-good groove to it” said Heran Mamo, R&B and hip-hop magazine.
Nigerian musician, Burna Boy is the first African artist to sell out a U.S. stadium when he played ‘New York’s Citi Field’ last summer.
One of the African artists gunning for the new Grammy category on Sunday is Tyla. She recorded a top 10 Billboard hit with her danceable single “Water”. The song is an example of what Afrobeats entails. It is a jazz and piano-infused sound.
She got attention from a TikTok executive in her home country back in 2020. He got in touch with her on how to maximize her talent with the app. Her hit single was released in July 2023 after she got signed under Sony Music Entertainment’s Records.
TikTok users were already replicating Tyla’s dance challenge by September; #WaterChallenge. The challenge has over 1.5 million videos and the #WaterChallenge hashtag has 1.8 billion views, according to TikTok.
I think that TikTok has played the role of incubator, but also the distributor to the billion-plus global users and it’s just really landed,”
Ole Obermann, global head of music at TikTok
Her success further enforces the power TikTok and YouTube have in gaining fans with a wider audience.
The proliferation of streaming along with new social media platforms (e.g. TikTok) has accelerated artist discovery, and have provided new mediums for artists to grow their fan bases globally,”
Bank of America analyst Jessica Reif said
The app has been prohibited on U.S. government devices because of its ownership by Chinese company ByteDance which is being viewed as a security threat. However, TikTok officials have rejected the allegations of spying on users’ personal information.
Universal Music Group artists have their music unavailable on the platform over the money the platform pays for the use of their songs.
TikTok ranks as the most common music discovery source behind YouTube in the United States. Reports from the MIDiA Research survey say that 45% of teenagers in the country found new music through the platform.
Another Afrobeats artist who gained traction on the app is Rema. The Nigerian musician got his top 10 Billboard record hit with his collaboration with Selena Gomez for the remix of his hit single “Calm Down” which got to No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 last year June.
TikTok is helping to forge new bonds between U.S. artists and their African counterparts. Obermann said he played seconds of a song called “Ojapiano” from Nigerian musician KCee for Ryan Tedder, a songwriter and lead singer for the band OneRepublic.
Tedder reached out to KCee immediately when he heard the song. He got to Nigeria from Los Angeles within two days he heard it for a remix.
Obermann expects the incoming release to give new life to “Ojapiano” a fusion of Amapiano and South African flute called “Oja”
This is going to be a big, growing genre,”
Obermann said
