Call Wizkid an Afrobeat star in front of a Kuti and you may get a lecture. One letter separates Afrobeat from Afrobeats, and so do about forty years, two cities and a whole philosophy of what music is for. Afrobeat is the protest music Fela Kuti built in Lagos at the end of the 1960s. Afrobeats is the umbrella name a London DJ gave to West African pop in 2011.
The two get mixed up all the time, by radio presenters, award shows and even some of the artists. So here is Afrobeat vs Afrobeats explained in 12 facts, with a few surprises along the way, including the Accra nightclub where the older name was reportedly born.
1. Afrobeat came first, and one man built it
Afrobeat (no “s”) is a genre with a clear author. Fela Kuti, born Olufela Olusegun Oludotun Ransome-Kuti in Abeokuta on 15 October 1938, pieced it together from highlife, jazz, funk, Yoruba rhythms and chanted vocals. He went to London in 1958 to study at Trinity College of Music, formed a jazz-highlife band called Koola Lobitos, and came home in 1963 to a scene that did not quite know what to do with him. He even played for a while in Victor Olaiya‘s All-Stars.
The turning point was a ten-month stay in Los Angeles in 1969. There he met Sandra Smith, a singer close to the Black Panther Party, who handed him the writings of Malcolm X and others. Fela later said he realised he had not been playing African music at all. The band came back to Nigeria as Africa ’70, the love songs gave way to songs about power and corruption, and Afrobeat as we know it began.
2. The name “Afrobeat” may have been born in Accra
Here is the fact most Ghanaians do not know. Professor John Collins, the University of Ghana music lecturer, told Joy FM in 2015 that Fela invented the word in Accra in 1968. “The word Afrobeat was invented in Accra by Fela, it wasn’t in Nigeria,” he said. “He actually coined the name because he wanted to distinguish his name from soul.”
Collins described a love-hate relationship with James Brown. Fela was in a Ghanaian club listening to Brown, got annoyed, and decided his own music needed a different name. Wikipedia’s account of the genre agrees on the motive: the label was partly a way to separate Fela’s sound from American soul.
3. “Without Tony Allen, there would be no Afrobeat”
That line is Fela’s own. Tony Allen was the drummer and musical director of Africa ’70 from 1968 to 1979, and he played on more than 30 albums with Fela. He was the only member of the band who wrote his own parts. Fela wrote out everyone else’s.
Allen had Ghana in him too. His mother, Prudentia Mettle, came from the Gold Coast, and as a young drummer he studied the Ghanaian Afro-jazz pioneer Guy Warren, later known as Kofi Ghanaba. Brian Eno called Allen “perhaps the greatest drummer who has ever lived”. He died in Paris on 30 April 2020, aged 79.
4. Afrobeat was dangerous music
Fela set up the Kalakuta Republic in Lagos in 1970, a commune and recording studio that declared itself independent of the military government. In 1977 he released Zombie, which mocked Nigerian soldiers as mindless men who follow orders. The government’s answer was a raid by about 1,000 soldiers. Kalakuta was burnt down, Fela was badly beaten, and his mother, the women’s rights campaigner Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, was thrown from a window and later died of her injuries.
The next year, rioting broke out during “Zombie” at a concert in Accra, and Fela was banned from entering Ghana. In 1984 Muhammadu Buhari’s government jailed him on a currency smuggling charge that Amnesty International called political. He served 20 months. No Afrobeats star has paid that kind of price for a song.
5. Afrobeat songs were long. Very long.
The genre was built for bands, not radio edits. Big horn sections, long instrumental solos and slow-building grooves were the point, and a single track could fill a whole side of a record. Fela’s “I.T.T. (International Thief-Thief)”, aimed at the ITT Corporation and at Moshood Abiola and Olusegun Obasanjo, runs for about 25 minutes. Compare that with a modern Afrobeats single built to work in a 15-second TikTok clip.
6. “Afrobeats” was named in London in 2011
The “s” arrived in the UK. The Guardian credited DJ Abrantee, a Ghanaian-British presenter, with coining “Afrobeats” when he launched a dedicated show on Choice FM in April 2011. He wanted one easy label for the new music coming out of Lagos, Accra and London so that British listeners would know what they were hearing.
Abrantee has always been careful about the credit. “I cannot say I invented Afrobeats,” he said. “Afrobeats was invented before I was born. It was invented by Fela Kuti.” His point was that artists such as Wizkid, P-Square and Ice Prince were already calling their music Afrobeats, so that is what he called it on his mixtapes.
7. Afrobeats is an umbrella, not one sound
This is the biggest difference of all. Afrobeat is a defined style. Afrobeats is a marketing term that gathers hiplife, azonto, Naija beats, jùjú, highlife, dancehall, R&B and house influences under one roof. Ghana’s azonto wave, which Sarkodie helped push with “U Go Kill Me” in 2011, sits under it. So does amapiano-flavoured “Afropiano”.
That is why so many stars prefer their own names. Wizkid, Burna Boy and Davido have all used “Afro-fusion” or “Afro-pop”. Mr Eazi calls his sound “banku music”, after the Ghanaian dish, to credit Ghana’s influence. Rema came up with “Afrorave”. Don Jazzy prefers “Afro-pop”.
8. The Kuti family is not a fan of the “s”
Fela’s daughter Yeni Kuti has said she would rather people called it “Nigerian pop” or “Naija Afropop”. His youngest son, Seun Kuti, who still leads his father’s last band Egypt 80, has been blunter: “You cannot just call some pop music Afrobeat just because it’s coming from Africa.”
Burna Boy has also said he does not want his music called Afrobeats. Ghanaian hiplife pioneer reggie-rockstone/">Reggie Rockstone takes a softer line. Hiplife now often gets filed under that umbrella, yet he told the writer Gabriel Myers Hansen: “It is one Africa, and I’m pan-African to the bone. So do I really care if it’s called Afrobeats or hiplife?”
9. The two worlds share a family tree
The neatest link between old and new runs through one family. Benson Idonije, the Nigerian broadcaster and jazz critic, was Fela Kuti’s first band manager. His daughter is Bose Ogulu, and her son is Burna Boy. So the biggest Afro-fusion star of his generation is the grandson of the man who managed the father of Afrobeat.
The Kutis themselves bridge the gap too. Femi Kuti took over the reissues of his father’s catalogue after 1997, and his son Made Kuti is the third generation playing Afrobeat. Burna Boy and Wizkid have both sampled Fela in their own records.
10. Afrobeats conquered the charts
The global run is well known now, but the firsts are worth listing. D’banj’s “Oliver Twist” reached number 9 in the UK in 2012, the first Afrobeats song in the UK top ten. Wizkid appeared on Drake’s “One Dance” in 2016, which became the most streamed song on Spotify at the time and earned him a Guinness World Record.
Then came Wizkid and Tems‘s “Essence”, the first African song to reach the top ten of the Billboard Hot 100 and the first to go platinum in the US, in 2021.
Rema’s “Calm Down” remix with Selena Gomez reached number three on the Hot 100 and passed a billion Spotify streams. Billboard called it Afrobeats’ biggest crossover hit.
In 2024 the Grammys added a Best African Music Performance category, and South Africa’s Tyla won the first one with “Water”. Tems won it in 2025. Burna Boy, meanwhile, became the first Afrobeats artist to perform at the Grammy Awards ceremony in 2024.
11. The world finally honoured Afrobeat too, in 2026
This year belongs to the old man as well. In January 2026 the Recording Academy gave Fela Kuti a posthumous Lifetime Achievement Award at the 68th Grammy Awards, making him the first African artist to receive it since the award began in 1963. His children Femi, Yeni and Kunle accepted it. Later in 2026 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the musical influence category, after two earlier nominations.
Both honours came almost three decades after his death in Lagos on 2 August 1997. Every October since 1998, Yeni Kuti’s Felabration festival has filled the New Afrika Shrine in Ikeja for a week around his birthday, and in 2009 his life story reached Broadway as the musical Fela!, which picked up 11 Tony nominations.
12. How to tell them apart on first listen
If you are still unsure which one you are hearing, a few clues help. Afrobeat usually comes with a big live band, a horn section, long solos and lyrics about politics, sung in pidgin so that listeners across Africa could follow. Tracks stretch past ten minutes and the groove takes its time to arrive.
Afrobeats is pop. The drum pattern leads, often built around a clave rhythm in 4/4, and the songs are short, catchy and made for dancing. Lyrics mix English, pidgin and local languages such as Yoruba or Twi, and the subject is far more likely to be love or a good night out than a military government. Davido’s “Fall”, which became the first Nigerian Afrobeats video to pass 200 million YouTube views, is a good example.
Both have a place, and the newer one would not exist without the older. If you want the history, start with “Zombie” and “Water No Get Enemy”. If you want the present, start with the songs above and work your way through our artist directory. Just keep the “s” in the right place.
