African music rises on global charts with TikTok's help

LOS ANGELES — When the biggest names in music gathered on Sunday for the industry's top honors at the Grammy Awards, they handed out a new trophy for best African music performance to South African singer Tyla for her hit, Water.

The prize aims to highlight regional musical traditions and recognize "recordings that utilize unique local expressions" across Africa. It also reflects the growing popularity of music from the continent, such as Afrobeats, which is gaining global audience with the help from social media platforms such as short video app TikTok.

Afrobeats originated in West Africa, primarily Ghana and Nigeria, though the term is often used as a catchall for various music styles coming from Africa. It features percussion rhythms mixed with various genres from rap to jazz, R&B and others.

Modern Afrobeats has "a feel-good groove to it", said Heran Mamo, R&B and hip-hop reporter at Billboard magazine, which created a US Afrobeats chart in 2022. "It's bound to reach a wider audience because it already contains a little bit of everything for everyone."

On Spotify, a digital music service, Afrobeats music was streamed 13.5 billion times in 2022, up from 2 billion in 2017.

Tyla, 22, hit the top 10 on Billboard's Hot 100 chart with the danceable Water, an example of a genre known as amapiano, a jazzand piano-infused sound.

A TikTok executive in South Africa had noticed Tyla gaining attention in her local market back in 2020, and reached out to her with tips on how to maximize her presence on the app.

Water was released in July, after Tyla signed with Sony Music Entertainment's Epic Records.

Hashtag going viral

By September, TikTok users were replicating Tyla's dance moves in the #WaterChallenge. To date, 1.5 million videos have been created using the song, and the #WaterChallenge hashtag has been viewed 1.8 billion times, according to TikTok.

"I think that TikTok has played the role of incubator, but also the distributor to the billion-plus global users, and it's just really landed," Ole Obermann, global head of music at TikTok, said.

Tyla's success illustrates the power of TikTok and YouTube to help artists find fan bases around the world, a role once reserved for music labels.

"The proliferation of streaming along with new social media platforms has accelerated artist discovery, and has provided new mediums for artists to grow their fan bases globally," Bank of America Securities analyst Jessica Reif Cohen said in a research note predicting this year's media trends.

For US teenagers, TikTok ranks as the second-most common music discovery source behind YouTube, according to a recent MIDiA Research survey that showed 45 percent of 16- to 19-year-olds found new music through the platform.

Agencies Via Xinhua