Culture Through Conversations: How Comments and Livestreams Rewired Afrobeats

In the stillness of a lockdown caused by a global pandemic, Afrobeats did not stall. It recalibrated. Deprived of dance floors and festival stages, the genre’s pulse migrated online, where fans, artists, producers, and critics began talking to one another in public, sometimes all at once. What followed wasn’t just a makeshift substitute for nightlife; it was a structural shift. The work of percussion, keys, and hooks was joined by something less tangible but just as propulsive: connection, vulnerability, and a sense of community.

Before 2020, the machinery around Afrobeats looked familiar: label-led rollouts, press tours, blockbuster collaborations, and the occasional crossover hit shaping a tidy narrative arc. Fans consumed, reacted, and queued for the next show. Then the lights went out, and the comment section became the venue.

A genre reborn online

Social platforms became makeshift town halls where the gatekeepers’ grips loosened. Fans debated sequencing and sound design, argued about lineage and influence, and put artists and executives on the spot in real time. Communities including WeTalkSound and Afrobeats to the World convened listening parties and debriefs that doubled as A&R focus groups. The genre’s blend of West African rhythms with hip-hop, R&B, and dancehall didn’t change overnight, but the conversation around it did, becoming deeper, more granular, more personal.

That dialogue helped push introspective themes into the foreground. Mental health, ambition, heartbreak, and the anxieties of hustling through uncertainty threaded through early-pandemic releases. Omah Lay’s “Get Layd” and Chike’s “Boo of the Booless” became the kinds of records listeners dissected together, turning solitary headphone sessions into group therapy in the comments. In the absence of arenas, intimacy became an aesthetic.

The new tastemakers

As media circuits paused and stages stayed dark, a different class of tastemaker emerged: the commentator-curator with a camera, a mic, and a timeline. Fans organized online “battles,” including a widely watched face-off between Naeto C and M.I. Abaga, that weren’t just spectacles but canon-making exercises, collective memory in real time. Documenting these flashpoints, independent hosts and culture writers accrued influence by showing up, archiving, and arguing.

With proximity came fluency. Debates rarely stopped at “What’s the best song?” Listeners parsed production credits, streaming economics, and split sheets. The audience grew more informed and therefore more confident about what success should look like and who gets to define it.

Democratizing discovery

Streaming turned this energy into momentum. As discovery habits shifted decisively to digital platforms, fans could wander across regions, scenes, and moods at will. According to Spotify, Afrobeats listenership in Nigeria has grown by more than 4,000% since 2021, with tracks saved to libraries or added to personal playlists over 6 million times. The specific figures can be debated; the direction of travel cannot. Curated global playlists amplified word-of-mouth popularity, and word of mouth, newly supercharged by short-form video, could move a song across borders in days.

Rema’s “Calm Down” is the case study that has already hardened into lore. Its ascent began the way so many modern hits do: with fan-made clips and dance challenges that spread faster than any single press campaign could. The Selena Gomez remix widened the aperture, but the groundwork was laid by users who treated the song as a social object first and a chart entry second. In September 2023, “Calm Down” became the first track by an African artist to surpass 1 billion Spotify streams, and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry later ranked the remix the world’s second-bestselling single of 2023. Today, it stands among the most-streamed Afrobeats songs with Gen Z listeners globally, proof that a captivated audience can carry a record far beyond its presumed limits.

From stans to a scene

In the past, stans used to be a genre’s tastemaker. Devotional fan bases, like Wizkid FC, shaped discourse and outcomes. But the gravitational center shifted in the 2020s. The internet’s buffet of playlists, mood mixes, and algorithmic rabbit holes nudged listeners from singular loyalty toward scene loyalty. This is reflected in Spotify’s Afrobeats playlist data, where the number of new playlists grew by an average of 41% year-on-year, and more than 200,000 playlists were made globally in 2023 alone. It’s an indicator that the thrill now often lies in discovery itself—a thread recommending a Port Harcourt crooner you’ve never heard of; a friend’s playlist that sneaks a Ghanaian drill track between two Lagos pop cuts.

That widening aperture has commercial and symbolic consequences. As listening diversified, so did the metrics that matter. In July 2020, the Billboard’s official UK Afrobeats chart launched. This was followed by the March 2022 launch of Billboard’s US Afrobeats Songs chart. These end points, the data-driven validation of a long-brewing groundswell, reflect what fans had already made true online. These dedicated charts provide tangible metrics for the genre’s commercial success, influencing investment decisions and the growth of an industry within the genre.  

The industry catches up

Labels and publicists have adjusted, if unevenly. Rollouts now assume that liftoff might happen on TikTok or in a Telegram group before a press release lands. Artists pop into their own comment sections, cohost listening sessions, or invite producers and critics onto livestreams to make the case for a track’s arrangement. The distance between studio and audience has compressed, and with it the timeline for feedback. Songs are no longer just marketed; they are workshopped in public.

If this new order dilutes some of the mystery around pop stardom, it also distributes power. Fans have become co-authors, amplifying, annotating, and sometimes course-correcting the story of Afrobeats as it unfolds.

What endures

The most durable change may be cultural rather than commercial. The pandemic years forced a kind of soul-searching that outlasted the emergency. Afrobeats emerged with a sturdier, more inclusive social architecture, a discourse built by people who gather around the music, trade stories through it, and carry it across oceans. The artists remain central, but the choruses around them have grown wiser, louder, and harder to ignore.

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.

Visit our full Afrobeats 2.0 experience on For the Record to discover more.