What is Afromusic?

ADT
2 min readJun 12, 2016

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As music in Africa evolves and artists are making significant progress in fine tuning their sounds, it is safe to say that not every song can be simply classed as Afrobeats anymore.

Infact, it is possible that the term Afrobeat has been misused for songs more times than it has been labeled correctly.
This is simply my attempt at unifying the whole thing like how Hip-Hop has several sub-genres such as Rap, Trap, Grime and many others.

So What is Afromusic?

  • At the basic level, a song performed by an artist targeted primarily at the African audience is classed under Afromusic.
  • A song that uses lingo, intonations, slang or expressions attributed to sub-Saharan Africa can be classified as Afromusic.

Therefore Afromusic can be said to be an umbrella term for the following sub genres:
- AfroBeat
- AfroPop
- AfroRap
- AfroHouse
- Fuji
- Highlife
- and others

Disclaimer: I did not come up with the term Afromusic. My aim here is to bring a unified definition to the word (maybe a Wikipedia entry would be more appropriate here?).

Please feel free to refine my definition and add more sub-genres.

Many thanks to my sister for proofreading this.

Marked as a reference piece.

🔌 Plug: If you would like good Afromusic in your inbox you can sign up here

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ADT

My essays lie at the intersection of design and human behaviour. Previously Co-founder @eclecticsource