From Nigeria to the World - Afrobeats Is Having a Global Moment

The global appreciation of West Africa's Afrobeats music has grown significantly in the last decade. Afrobeats stars are touring the world, raking up record sales, winning awards and collaborating with big-name international artists, writes Samson Uchenna Eze for The Conversation.

Seven of the nine African artists nominated for a 2022 Grammy Award - one of the world's most sought-after music awards - are West African. Most of these artists make music driven by Afrobeats sounds. These are Angelique Kidjo (Benin), Rocky Duwani (Ghana), Femi Kuti, Made Kuti, Wizkid, Burna Boy and Tems (Nigeria).

There have been extensive conversations on the differences and similarities between Afrobeat and Afrobeats. But within this selection of Grammy nominees what is immediately obvious are the lines where the two genres come together. Afrobeats is a broad, generic term for African contemporary popular music with rhythmic and harmonic influences of West Africa's highlife and Afrobeat traditions and Euro-American funk and hip-hop.

For the 2022 edition of the Grammy Awards, Nigeria's Wizkid is nominated twice - for best global music album and best global performance. Wizkid won his first Grammy Award in 2021 for the video of Brown Skin Girl, a track he made with U.S. superstar Beyonce. Other African musicians that have received nominations for the 2022 Grammy Awards include Burna Boy, Tems, Femi Kuti, Made Kuti, Angélique Kidjo, Rocky Dawuni, and Black Coffee.

Afrobeats is no longer confined to Nigeria, Ghana, or West Africa alone. Artists from southern Africa, Rwanda, the UK, and Europe have all been bitten by the bug.