By Vanessa Obioha
On June 22, 2023, the global music streaming platform Spotify launched a dedicated website that tracks everything Afrobeats. The eye-popping website, designed to endear visitors to the intriguing world of Afrobeats, boasts sections that trace the origin of the genre, its evolution, fusion, cultural export and, of course, the female trailblazers of the genre.
“We created this site for both new and longtime fans of the genre, who would like to have a better understanding of how and where this explosive sound came to be,” says Jocelyne Muhutu-Remy, Spotify’s Managing Director for Sub-Saharan Africa.
Afrobeats explosion has captivated millions of music fans across the globe. On Spotify, the genre has grown by 550% since 2017, and it was streamed more than 13 billion times in 2022. In 2023 alone, the genre has been played for more than 223 million hours, with streams exceeding 7.1 billion.
The music streaming platform intends to make the Afrobeats site a sort of repository, housing text, infographics and visual elements, including Spotify streaming data and results from the Spotify commissioned April 2023 Afrobeats survey. The survey, conducted by research firm Kuvora, tracks the rise of Afrobeats and its cultural impact over decades.
The site will be updated on a biweekly basis for the next eight weeks but will remain active beyond this as an always-on resource, with frequent updates on new Afrobeats moments. It will also include an interactive experience for fans to discover and connect with new knowledge on Afrobeats.
Key Afrobeats timelines over the years, interesting Spotify data, excerpts from interviews with industry experts and man-on-the-street videos from key markets in Sub-Saharan Africa are featured on the site.
To kick off the journey, Origins, the first instalment of the Afrobeats journey, is live on the website.
