Spotify is launching a dedicated Afrobeats hub on its service, offering a mixture of playlists, podcasts, articles and videos.
Called simply ‘Afro’ it’s partly a window for Spotify’s key playlists in and around the genre: ‘African Heat’, ‘Afropop’, ‘Motive’, ‘We Everywhere’ and ‘Essence’ are among those showcased prominently.
The hub also shows new releases, and also casts its net wider than purely Afrobeats with playlists for Bongo Flava, Gengetone, Kwaito and other genres/scenes.
The hub’s launch follows Spotify’s announcement earlier this year that Afrobeats tracks were streamed 13.5bn times on its service in 2022.
The blog post announcing the hub starts with the phrase “With more than 15 billion streams (and counting)” which suggests that the 2022 total may have already been beaten in 2023.
Spotify also paid out more than $14.2m of royalties in 2022 for music created by Nigerian artists, and Rema’s ‘Calm Down’ recently became the first African artist-led track to reach 1bn streams on Spotify.
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