Afrobeats Has Reached the End of Innocence

The global success of Nigerian pop music has disrupted the relationship between artists, audiences and the ecosystem that produced them. The resulting confusion may signal not an ending, but a necessary reinvention.

There is a point when confusion stops being an event and becomes an environment. Fela Kuti understood this. He first recorded Confusion in the mid-1970s; decades later, Confusion Break Bone appeared on the last album he would release. It reads almost like a final diagnosis: after years of living inside confusion, it was no longer simply happening around the body. It had entered the bones.

Lagos knows this intimately. Here, noise is information and chaos requires navigation. Traffic stops; another route appears. Electricity disappears; generators roar until solar panels arrive. Rain becomes flood; trousers are rolled up, boots and canoes appear. Prices change overnight; calculations change with them. Millions of tiny negotiations happen before thought. Systems fail, bodies adjust.

Confusion produces choreography.

I know something about choreography. I have spent much of my life watching bodies solve problems, and a dancer does not always recover from imbalance by returning to the original position. Sometimes the fall reveals another movement, the mistake becomes material, and the body survives by abandoning the choreography it was trying to preserve. I have been thinking about this while watching Afrobeats enter its own season of confusion.

From the outside, Afrobeats remains one of Africa’s great contemporary success stories. Nigerian artists fill arenas, accumulate billions of streams, collaborate with global stars and command fees unimaginable to the generation that preceded them. But inside the ecology, another conversation is taking place.

Promoters complain that major artists have become prohibitively expensive to book at home. Artists know that accepting significantly less in Nigeria makes little economic sense when international markets will pay more. Production costs have risen. Emerging musicians struggle to find stages on which to become experienced performers. Across parts of Lagos nightlife, the economics of tables, bottles and visibility increasingly compete with the economics of the dancefloor.

There is an artistic anxiety too: the suspicion that Nigerian pop has become increasingly conscious of what the global market, and its algorithms, expect Nigerian pop to sound like. These are usually discussed as separate problems. I suspect they belong to the same choreography. Afrobeats may not be dying at all. Perhaps the choreography that brought it here simply cannot take it where it needs to go next.

When Nobody Knew the Steps

“Afrobeats” has always been an imperfect name, attempting to contain a sprawling commercial ecosystem around contemporary West African, particularly Nigerian, popular music: sounds emerging from different histories, cities, classes, technologies and traditions that never entirely belonged to one genre.

That unruliness was part of the point. There was no manifesto, no government policy, no committee determining what qualified. Highlife met hip-hop. Fújì entered the club. Jùjú conversed with R&B. Dancehall arrived from the Caribbean. Gospel refused to remain in church. Ifá verses became lyrics. American rap was borrowed, misunderstood, domesticated and sent back wearing Lagos clothes.

The ecosystem was chaotic and often brutally exploitative. Piracy was rampant, contracts were poor, infrastructure was weak and artists and producers were routinely cheated. There is no reason to romanticise it. Technology has since created possibilities an earlier generation could barely imagine. A young producer can make music in a bedroom and reach listeners across continents. Artists can build audiences without waiting for radio programmers or record executives. Dances can travel across TikTok before a television station notices them. Entire communities of taste can form online.

The old world was not better simply because it was older. But something about proximity mattered. A song had to survive Nigerian life. Not one mythical, unified Lagos audience—there has never been such a thing—but a collision of publics: the bus, the street, the campus, the wedding, the barber’s shop, the radio station, the nightclub, the market, the DJ’s hard drive. Different Lagoses kept bumping into one another.

People danced to a song before anybody knew its streaming numbers. The audience was not primarily data; it was an environment. The feedback was immediate. A song failed publicly, another exploded. Slang mutated. A dance appeared. The street answered, the artist answered back. Artist and audience existed inside a relatively dense feedback loop. Then the world arrived.

And what followed was extraordinary. Streaming opened borders, international touring created wealth, producers became global collaborators, and Nigerian artists who might once have struggled to tour West Africa began selling out arenas in London and New York. Success was not the problem. Success changed the incentives, and incentives change choreography. The question in the studio gradually expanded from Will this move people here? to Will this travel? Those questions can coexist, but they are not identical. The imagined listener and primary audience matters.

Once the artist is also imagining London, Atlanta, TikTok, Spotify playlists, international festivals and Grammy voters, the music naturally begins responding to those environments. Collaborations become more strategic, references more portable, production more responsive to global trends. Some of the rough edges that require cultural intimacy to understand begin to soften. None of this is betrayal. It is adaptation. The danger begins when a culture’s most consequential measures of success migrate outside the culture itself. International recognition begins to carry enormous consequences while domestic institutions struggle to retain equivalent authority.

The compass did not move only because the money moved, but money has an extraordinary ability to tell culture where north is. Naturally, people follow the compass. Yet something else may have moved with it: proximity. Not physical proximity necessarily, because digital technology has collapsed physical distance almost completely. Rather, the intimate feedback between artist and audience, the sense that each is somehow listening to the other.

The irony is that social networks initially promised precisely this kind of closeness. But as networks became marketplaces, followers became metrics, conversations became engagement, communities became audiences, and audiences increasingly became data. The problem is not data. The danger is when the audience becomes only data.

Everybody Did the Right Thing

It is tempting to reduce what follows to greed: artists charge too much, managers are unreasonable, promoters exploit audiences, clubs overcharge, labels chase formulas. But moralising misses the more interesting problem. What if almost everybody is behaving rationally? An artist discovers that their labour commands hundreds of thousands of dollars internationally, and their management begins valuing their time accordingly. A Lagos promoter wants the same artist but earns principally in naira. Production costs have risen; equipment, power and security are expensive, while international technical standards must still be met.

So the promoter raises ticket prices. The fan’s income has not risen accordingly, so the fan stays home. The promoter loses money and becomes more cautious; fewer shows happen. The emerging artist loses the platform on which they might have opened for the established artist, while the established artist performs more often abroad. Increasingly, the Nigerian audience encounters its own stars through screens. Nobody needed to make an irrational decision in this vicious cycle. Everyone behaved logically; only the system became irrational.

This may be one of the central contradictions facing Nigerian popular music today: the music globalised faster than the economy around it. The artist became dollar-valued while the audience remained naira-paid. The booking agent thinks internationally while the promoter sells locally. The platform is global and much of the production infrastructure imported, yet the person expected to fill the Lagos venue still lives inside the Nigerian economy. Two economic realities are dancing to the same song.

Eventually, somebody misses the beat. Because you can become too expensive to remain culturally present.

Price does not merely respond to demand; it also reshapes participation. An artist can price themselves out of circulation, a promoter can price audiences out of attendance, a nightclub can price dancers off the dancefloor. Prestige can rise while participation falls, and that is particularly dangerous for popular music because popular culture depends on circulation. It needs bodies, repetition, sweat, cheap speakers, bad speakers, wedding parties, cars in traffic, street corners, teenagers who cannot afford VIP tables. Popular music must remain, in some meaningful sense, popular. And perhaps popularity is not merely about how many people can hear you. It is also about how close they can get.

Where Did the Bodies Go?

When things begin to fall apart, the fracture often appears first in the middle. At the top, the stars remain stars, at the bottom, thousands of upcoming artists still dream. What becomes vulnerable is the connective tissue between them: the affordable concert, the mid-sized venue, the promoter willing to gamble, the brand willing to invest in emergence, the local institution with cultural consequence, the room where a strange song can become culture before an algorithm knows what to call it.

An ecosystem can hollow out while looking spectacular from outside. The Lagos dancefloor offers one small but revealing example. In parts of mainstream nightlife, a table can be economically more valuable than the dancing bodies on the floor, so naturally the room reorganises itself around the table. VIP sections expand. Bodies become spectators of other people’s consumption. Consumption itself becomes performance. Economics changed the choreography. Lagos, however, did not stop dancing. Those looking for somewhere to dance simply moved.

Raves appeared. Alternative scenes grew. Dance fitness studios filled. Religious revivals reorganised. Queer communities created sanctuaries. Street parties persisted. Private gatherings formed. New collectives built rooms around sounds that mainstream nightlife could not accommodate. Perhaps what looks like disappearance from the centre is actually migration towards the edges. The road closed, but the body found another route.

Dancefloors are important cultural laboratories. Songs are tested there. Strangers encounter one another there. Gestures appear before critics have language for them. Bodies tell musicians things FL Studio and streaming dashboards cannot. So the interesting question is not whether Lagos still dances. It is whether its different bodies still encounter one another. Perhaps what we are losing is not the dancefloor itself, but the friction between different sonic rooms, the collisions through which unexpected things become possible. And something similar may be happening to the music.

Afrobeats’ success produced the temptation of monoculture. Once everyone discovered the winning crop, everyone planted it. Labels wanted Afrobeats. Brands wanted Afrobeats. Radio wanted Afrobeats. Promoters wanted Afrobeats. Young musicians understandably wanted access to the economy Afrobeats had created. This is not Afrobeats’ fault. It is what happens when success becomes strategy. Monocultures can be extraordinarily productive, but they are also fragile. A healthy ecology needs things that are not presently winning: experiments, failures, small audiences, strange sounds, genres whose economic value has not yet become obvious. The next cultural revolution is usually invisible to the people measuring the present one.

We Mistook Stars for an Industry

Nigeria became very good at celebrating evidence of success without constructing enough of the conditions for succession. A Nigerian sells out the O2: congratulations. A Nigerian wins a Grammy: national pride. Another crosses a billion streams and we reward them with photographs, headlines and applause. These achievements matter, but stars are not an industry. An industry is the ecology that allows thousands of people who will never become Wizkid, Burna Boy or Tems to nevertheless build dignified lives around music. It is the room where somebody performs badly for the first time, the promoter who can afford to take a risk, the technician who works every weekend, the 300-capacity venue, the regional circuit, the rehearsal room, the music journalist, the archivist, the teacher, the independent label, the strange little event nobody important attends.

Government surely bears responsibility for this failure of imagination, but so does the industry itself. We enjoyed the boom without investing sufficiently in the ecology that would survive it. We became exceptionally good at producing and celebrating winners while paying less attention to the conditions that produce possibility. And this is where the story becomes larger than Afrobeats. Perhaps Afrobeats is giving us a particularly Nigerian view of a much larger crisis: we have become extraordinarily good at extracting value from living systems and remarkably poor at reproducing the conditions that made those systems valuable.

A neighbourhood becomes desirable; eventually the people who made it desirable cannot afford to live there. Tourism discovers an “authentic” place; investment arrives until authenticity itself is priced out. Digital platforms grow from human creativity; eventually creators reorganise themselves around what the platform can measure. Something alive emerges. Capital discovers it, measures it, scales it, optimises it, until eventually the measurement begins reorganising the life that produced it. The problem is not capital itself. Capital can finance experimentation, expand possibilities and allow artists to live from their work. The problem begins when extraction is not accompanied by regeneration. And perhaps efficiency is part of the problem too.

Capital is very good at shortening distances. Culture often needs the opposite: time spent together, repetition, friction, trust, memory, accidents. The things that make relationships inefficient are often the same things that make it intimate. Culture makes this contradiction particularly visible because it depends on forms of value that optimisation frequently mistakes for inefficiency: the recurrent rehearsal that produces no show, the club night that barely breaks even, the musician playing strange music to forty people, the young promoter making mistakes, the local award nobody outside the country cares about, the artist who has not yet discovered what they are. These things are not economically useless. They are culturally unfinished. They produce skill, discipline, endurance, trust, taste, vocabulary, community, failure, memory and possibility. To a dashboard they may look insignificant. To cultural ecology, they are soil. Today’s unmeasurable activity may be tomorrow’s revolution. 

Perhaps, of course, none of what is happening to Afrobeats is unusual. Genres rise, industries form around them, formulas emerge, audiences tire, then something else arrives. Highlife changed. Jùjú changed. Hip-hop changed. Rock changed. Dancehall changed too. Why should Afrobeats be exempt from succession? It shouldn’t. The more urgent question is whether, in building an ecosystem so concentrated around what is presently successful, we have weakened the conditions from which its successor would ordinarily emerge. Have we left enough room for the next accident? Enough cheap rooms, bad performances, small audiences, collisions? Enough places where something can exist before anybody knows what to call it? Have we left enough proximity for artists and audiences to surprise one another again?

The End of Innocence

Whether or not Afrobeats is dying is almost beside the point. I think it has arrived at the end of innocence. A cultural movement became an industry and is discovering that growth and health are not synonyms. More streams do not automatically produce more stages, just as higher fees do not necessarily create a healthier economy. More global stars do not automatically produce more working musicians, and international recognition does not necessarily build local institutions. There is no going back, nor should there be. We cannot unknow Spotify. We cannot unknow that it is possible to sell out the O2. We cannot unknow the Grammy and its possibilities. And we cannot ask artists to become poorer so nostalgia can feel better.

Afrobeats has tasted global success. Now it must digest it. Perhaps the question is no longer how we save Afrobeats, but something stranger: What kind of cultural body does this confusion now require? This is where I return to Fela. And to Lagos, where confusion itself often feels like a system. Mastery in improvisation should never become an excuse for institutional failure. Survival is not infrastructure. But there is knowledge inside survival, and confusion is information. It tells us when the old map no longer corresponds to the territory. When maps fail, bodies become extraordinarily intelligent. They reroute. Perhaps Afrobeats has reached precisely that moment.

Maybe what comes next will not even be called Afrobeats. Maybe it is already germinating somewhere the current industry’s algorithms cannot see because it has too few streams, too little prestige, too strange a sound, too local an audience. Perhaps it is in a little studio, at a religious gathering, a rave, a mara cruise, a rehearsal room or a street party. Or perhaps the next change will not begin with a new sound at all. Perhaps it begins with a new relationship. An artist turning towards an audience again. An audience answering back. Old generations colliding with new ones. Memory becoming material rather than nostalgia. Technology being used not simply to accumulate reach, but to recover proximity. Because global reach and local intimacy do not have to be opposites. Maybe that is one of the routes confusion is revealing.

Our task may not be to predict what comes next. Perhaps our task is simply to make sure there is enough soil—and enough closeness—for it to grow. Fela spent decades listening to Nigeria’s confusion. We may need to learn to listen again, not simply to the horns or the politics, but to what confusion does to the body: the adjustment, the recovery, the rerouting, the movement that appears because something else has failed. The old choreography is breaking. Perhaps we should worry less about repairing it exactly as it was and listen more closely for where the bodies have already begun to move. Because somewhere beneath the noise of the old system, another rhythm is already learning how to become.