Spotify unveils new documentary, “Afrobeats: Culture in Motion”
Afrobeats has no formula. It now has to do with emotions; the way an artist feels about something or someone, the way a group of people feels, real-life experiences, and the way of life of an ethnic group. It has to do with a genre a particular artist decides to align with, such as rock, soul, classical, dancehall, etc. However, a lot of focus is placed on the artist’s culture. We now find a lot of subsets stemming from Afrobeats like Afrofusion, AfroSoul, Afropop, AfroDancehall, amongst others, with a global listenership and a global reach. The genre has now evolved as we see a new wave of artists exploring and experimenting with different sounds that resonate with their audience.
Spotify has announced a global initiative called “Afrobeats: Culture in Motion,” which chronicles the development of the genre over the past five years and the individuals driving its forward motion. Afrobeats, a genre that started in West Africa, has crossed a lot of boundaries and has inspired a young generation to flow with this motion and come up with exciting renditions and sounds.
Spotify, in its quest to capture this, has put together a documentary to tell the story of Afrobeats. Through intimate portraits of rising Nigerian and Ghanaian voices and Colombian artists newly fluent in Afrobeats, the film charts a living conversation across the Atlantic, where drum patterns, pidgin hooks, and barrio cadences meet. It’s culture on the move: West African style, slang, and spirituality finding new homes without losing its roots. In studios and street parties, this new wave taps a shared Afro-diasporic history to make something unapologetically global, unmistakably local, and irresistibly danceable, and celebrates the kinship between Africa and Latin America.
This initiative highlights how Afrobeats has grown from a regional sound into a global cultural force, generating over 240 million discoveries on Spotify worldwide in the last 12 months alone. “The launch is centered on a new Spotify documentary, Culture in Motion, which follows the next generation of Afrobeats artists. “This is complemented by an immersive microsite on Spotify’s newsroom that breaks down movement across five key pillars using exclusive interviews, context, and fresh Spotify listening data.” – Phiona Okumu, Spotify’s Head of Music, Sub-Saharan Africa
“Afrobeats isn’t defined by stages or charts alone. It’s also the comment thread that turns a verse into a communal confession, the livestream where a producer breaks down a drum pattern for thousands, the group chat that persuades a skeptic to give a new EP a fair listen. As long as those conversations continue—curious, raucous, deeply invested—the music will keep traveling. Beat by beat, debate by debate, the genre that learned to thrive in the quiet has become one of the noisiest, most generative conversations in global pop.” – Spotify
