Music — leading now
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Afrobeat is Fela Kuti's political big-band music from 1960s Nigeria. Afrobeats is the contemporary West African pop umbrella named in London around 2011. They are not the same genre.
PINCHED Music Desk
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Streaming turned Afrobeats into a global format. For the artists still recording in Lagos, Accra and Nairobi, the payout maths has not caught up.
PINCHED Music Desk
Read7 min readMusic
Tunde Bakare turned down three label deals to keep making records in a two-room flat in Yaba. His argument: proximity is the sound.
Kofi Mensah
Read8 min readMusic
A new Accra generation is treating the archive as raw material, not heritage.
Nana Adjei
Read4 min readMusic
He mixes in a two-room flat in Yaba and will not move. The reason is technical.
Tunde Bakare
Read5 min readMusic
Credits, producers and the two tracks worth your second listen.
Newsroom
Read6 min readMusic
Publishing, masters and the paperwork that decides who eats in five years.
Amaka Obi
Read7 min readMusic
The collaboration circuit is no longer one-way, and the tour maps prove it.
Zawadi Mwangi
Read4 min readMusic
Demand is up. Rooms are not. Promoters explain what breaks first.
Kofi Mensah
On rotation
PINCHED Music reports Afrobeats, alt, gospel, hip-hop and R&B from inside the rooms where the records are made — plus the business that decides who gets paid. Every week we name an artiste to watch and log the new releases that matter.
▶▶▶▶▶▶| # | Track | Artiste |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Highlife Is Not Nostalgia | Nana Adjei |
| 2 | The engineer behind three of this year's biggest records | Tunde Bakare |
| 3 | New releases: the week in singles and EPs | Newsroom |
| 4 | How an Afrobeats catalogue gets split | Amaka Obi |
| 5 | Global music: Lagos to São Paulo, in both directions | Zawadi Mwangi |
Artiste to watch
A new Accra generation is treating the archive as raw material, not heritage.
See this week's pick →New on rotation
PINCHED Music reports Afrobeats, alt, gospel, hip-hop and R&B from inside the rooms where the records are made — plus the business that decides who gets paid. Every week we name an artiste to watch and log the new releases that matter.
The desk covers African music globally: concerts, live music, music videos, interviews, playlists and music technology.
