Every Grammy night, Afrobeats arrives with hope and leaves with the same question: whose game are we actually playing? Joey Akan writes.
We’ve been here before. Afrobeats and all its pomp, hopes, shine, and appetite for the big moments have been here before. Once again, we’re experiencing the familiar feeling of a failed attempt to fly, the cathartic ebbing of pre-Grammy mass hysteria giving way into disbelief, the slow-dripping agony of heartbreak and acceptance, the local industry discombobulation, and a short but feisty grapple with the meaning of loss on music’s biggest stage.
On Sunday night, the 68th Annual Grammy Awards rolled into the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles. As is often the case, the best of global music made the journey for all that the ceremony offers: the chance to find inspiration, shake powerful and necessary hands, plant new seeds of collaboration at the highest levels of a $29 billion industry. And maybe, just maybe, return home with a trophy as reward for hard work.
The ceremony delivered. Countless parties and events graced the week. Performances, linkups and new pathways were forged. Winners were announced, speeches delivered, and trophies raised. A few tears were shed, and many wholesome moments generated. It’s a moving spectacle, where for one night, we get to discover how we fit into the global entertainment matrix.
The Recording Academy made Fela Kuti the first African recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award. The recognition comes at a moment when Fela’s legacy has become a point of public contention, with recent disputes over how contemporary Afrobeats artists should relate to the Afrobeat pioneer’s revolutionary work. For a figure who spent his life railing against Western institutions and suffered brutal consequences for his activism, being honored by the Recording Academy represents a complex full-circle moment. The timing feels significant, arriving nearly three decades after his death as arguments rage about what his name means and who has the right to invoke it.
The Fela award proves the Recording Academy knows how to honor African music properly when it chooses to. It can recognize towering influence, revolutionary artistry, and cultural impact that transcends geography. The Academy understands that some legacies demand their own space, their own terms of evaluation. The question now is whether that same clarity can be applied to the living, breathing genres that carry Fela’s torch forward.
The Nigerian entertainment industry continues to grapple with its place in the global order, and nights like these present enough data to fashion an informed consensus. At the turn of the 2020s, Afrobeats elevated itself to global acclaim. After nearly three decades of finding a viable sound and a working connection to major music markets, the scene finally found its way with hits by Wizkid, Davido, Burna Boy and an emergent generation of creators. Sony, Universal, Warner, Empire, and nearly every vital music corporation put boots on the ground, backing an ascending expression from West Africa.
Eight years have passed since 2018. The landscape has changed. Things appear to have hit a stasis at home, with the industry grappling with the loss of the novelty bounce. Questions are beginning to be asked about sustaining momentum and defending its vaunted position with new hits at the highest levels. Questions on return on investment, and how the market can find a route to sustainability.
While the world watched Afrobeats pull its weight from a consumerist perspective, its most important work happened in the background. In boardrooms and endless meetings around the world, the movement forced a reckoning. Afrobeats arrived on the global stage and demanded institutional recognition. The result: Billboard created an Afrobeats chart in 2022. Apple Music and Spotify built dedicated genre categories. And in 2023, the Recording Academy, after years of pressure, finally established a Best African Music Performance category at the Grammys.
This was supposed to be the victory lap. Afrobeats had achieved what seemed impossible: it made the world’s most powerful music institutions acknowledge Africa. And in some ways, it has worked. Nigeria has found its way to the winner’s circle. Tems won Best African Music Performance just last year, with a song rooted in African sensibility that connected globally. The category has proven it can reward the right music. But here’s where the story gets complicated, and where Sunday night’s ceremony reveals a structural problem that Afrobeats itself helped create.
Consider the case of David Adedeji Adeleke, known as Davido. His song “With You” wasn’t simply popular. It was the hottest song in West Africa, dominating airwaves and streaming platforms across the region for months. It was the sound of 2025 in Lagos, Accra, Dakar. When Afrobeats fans talk about what deserves recognition, this is exactly what they mean: songs that define moments, that soundtrack entire seasons, that everyone from taxi drivers to boardroom executives can’t stop playing.
Davido didn’t win. This marks his fourth Grammy nomination without a win, a painful pattern for one of Afrobeats’ most relentless builders. Burna Boy has won once. Wizkid has won once. Tems has won once in an African category. The losses outnumber the wins, but the wins are real. The system works. It simply wasn’t designed to capture everything Afrobeats actually is.
The winner was Tyla, and before the conversation goes any further, let’s be clear: it was a deserved win. “Push 2 Start” wasn’t just an African hit. It was a global one. The song hit the Billboard Hot 100, topped the US Afrobeats chart for twenty consecutive weeks, went gold in the US, platinum in Brazil, and charted across dozens of countries from the UK to the Philippines. Tyla became the first artist to win Best African Music Performance twice, and she did it the right way: with a song that carried African elements, specifically her signature blend of amapiano and pop, into the widest possible conversation. That’s exactly what the category asks for. She obeyed every parameter of the game and won.
The backlash against her win from Nigerian fans is precisely the kind of energy that needs to be interrogated. Tyla is South African. Her sound is rooted in the continent. She didn’t steal anything or sidestep anything. She simply reached further. And yet, for some, her win feels like a loss because she isn’t Nigerian. That reaction exposes the real tension hiding inside the category: when we say “African Music,” do we mean the continent, or do we mean Nigeria? Because the Grammys mean the continent. And Afrobeats, for all its dominance, is one genre within a much larger musical landscape. Directing frustration at Tyla instead of examining why the category is structured the way it is reveals more about where the real problem lies than any loss could.
The problem runs deeper than Afrobeats artists losing repeatedly. They are playing in a category that was never designed to fully capture what Afrobeats is. When the Recording Academy established the Best African Music Performance category, it made a crucial decision: it would honor “African music” broadly, not Afrobeats specifically. This might seem like an inclusive gesture. Why limit the category to one genre when Africa has so many? But in practice, it means Afrobeats competes against a wider field on terms that don’t necessarily reflect its dominance.
The category is too broad by design. Africa is a continent of 54 countries, with thousands of distinct musical traditions. Lumping them all into one Grammy category isn’t celebration. It’s consolidation. The Recording Academy is saying: “We’ll acknowledge you exist, but you all have to compete for one trophy.”
Compare this to how the Grammys treat American or European music. There’s no “Best North American Music” category forcing country, hip-hop, rock, and R&B to battle for a single award. Those genres get their own lanes, their own respect, their own space to be evaluated on their own terms. But African music? One category. Take it or leave it.
Afrobeats has earned its own category. Not as a subset of “African music,” but as a genre with its own history, its own aesthetic codes, its own commercial infrastructure and global reach. It has produced arena tours, billion-stream songs, and influenced pop music from Toronto to Tokyo. The genre has done the work. It has built the audience, generated the streams, and proved its commercial weight. What it needs now is a category that reflects that.
Instead, what we have is a system where songs like “With You,” which dominated West Africa, compete against songs that may have had bigger budgets, slicker productions, or collaborations with American artists that give them broader recognition with Grammy voters. The category becomes less about what’s hot in Accra or Lagos and more about what resonates in Los Angeles or New York. That’s not a flaw in Afrobeats. It’s a flaw in the frame.
This is the trap Afrobeats built for itself. By pushing so hard for institutional recognition, the genre accepted recognition on the institutions’ terms. The Recording Academy gave Afrobeats a category, but not autonomy. It gave African music visibility, but not on African music’s own terms. And so the conversation each Grammy night becomes less about celebrating what Afrobeats has achieved and more about measuring it against a standard it didn’t set.
The truth is Afrobeats has already won in the ways that matter most. It controls its own festivals, from Afro Nation to Detty December. It fills stadiums from London to Atlanta. It generates billions of streams and drives fashion trends and influences how young people speak and move across the world. Afrobeats artists negotiate directly with platforms and labels as equals, joint venture experts. The infrastructure is there. The audience is there. The money is there.
So why does losing hurt so much? Because representation matters, even when it’s imperfect. Because for artists like Davido, who have spent their entire careers building bridges between Africa and the world, a Grammy represents validation that their work matters beyond their home base. Because when young artists in Lagos or Kampala watch the Grammys, they’re watching to see if their dreams are possible on that stage. Call it ambition.
But ambition shouldn’t be spent crying over a loss. It should be spent changing the game. The Recording Academy isn’t our institution. It wasn’t built for us, and expecting it to fully understand what makes a song blow up in Warri or Kumasi is asking the wrong question. The right question is: how do we build a category that does? Play the game, or build your own. But stop treating every loss as an injustice when the terms were never yours to begin with.
What Afrobeats needs now isn’t more Grammy nominations under a flawed category. It needs to push for its own. An Afrobeats category that honors local dominance, that measures success by the metrics that actually matter to the genre. One that recognizes “With You” for what it was: the defining sound of a region. The Recording Academy has shown it can honor African music on its own terms. It did it with Fela. It’s time to do it with a living genre.
Davido will be fine. He’s a hustler, and soon, it will fall to him. His legacy isn’t determined by Grammy voters. It’s determined by the millions of people who made “With You” their anthem. But beyond Davido, beyond any single artist, Afrobeats has a bigger move to make. Stop measuring success by institutions that were never built to understand it. Build the ones that are.
The real question isn’t why Davido keeps losing Grammys. It’s why Afrobeats keeps giving the Grammys the power to define what winning looks like.
