How African Artists Broke Into the Grammy Mainstream

For a long stretch of Grammy history, African artists existed in a corner of the broadcast that most viewers never saw. Wins were announced during the Premiere Ceremony, the pre-telecast event held hours before the cameras went live. Winners thanked their families on a small podium, took their statues home, and watched the main show on television like everyone else. That arrangement felt permanent. It is not permanent anymore.

The shift did not happen in one ceremony or with one artist. It happened across a stretch that began with Burna Boy losing Best World Music Album in 2020, continued through his win a year later, ran through Tems taking a rap Grammy in 2023, and crystallised when Tyla walked off with the first Best African Music Performance trophy in 2024. The question is no longer whether African artists belong at the Grammys. The question is which categories they move into next, and whether the Recording Academy’s structure can hold what is arriving.

The Category That Changed Everything

The Recording Academy announced the Best African Music Performance category in 2023, ahead of the 66th ceremony. The decision followed years of lobbying from African label executives, US-based managers with African rosters, and Academy members who had grown frustrated with Best Global Music Performance functioning as a catch-all for everything that was not American, European or Latin.

Tyla won the inaugural trophy on 4 February 2024 for Water. The South African singer was twenty-two. The song had been inside the Billboard Hot 100 for months by the time she stepped up, and she won a field that included Burna Boy, Davido with Musa Keys, Asake with Olamide, and Ayra Starr. The room understood what had happened. A category created to honour African music had, on its first night, crowned its first international pop star.

A year later Tems won the second Best African Music Performance Grammy for Love Me JeJe. The choice felt different from Tyla’s. Where Water was a crossover smash built for American radio, Love Me JeJe was a reworking of Seyi Sodimu’s 1997 original, a song older Nigerians know by heart and younger ones learned through their parents. The Academy was not only rewarding the biggest streaming numbers. It was acknowledging the cultural memory inside the music.

Why the Category Matters Beyond the Trophy

Creating Best African Music Performance did something the Recording Academy probably did not intend. It exposed how cramped the old world music framing had been. Best World Music Album was renamed Best Global Music Album for the 63rd ceremony, the same one where Burna Boy won it for Twice as Tall. The rename was a symbolic gesture. The structural change came three years later, when African music finally got its own door.

African artists now compete in two distinct lanes. They can chase Best African Music Performance against continental peers, and they can push into Best Global Music Album or any genre category they qualify for. The split made room for ambition. It also raised the floor on what counts as a serious Grammy campaign for an African artist, because a single well-placed single is no longer the whole strategy.

Burna Boy and the Inflection Point

Burna Boy’s win for Twice as Tall, at the 63rd ceremony in March 2021, is usually framed as the moment African music broke through. The framing is half right. The album won Best Global Music Album, a category that had been called Best World Music Album until months earlier. The win was real, but the platform was not the main stage, and the announcement came during the pre-telecast.

What mattered about that night was the body of work around the campaign. Twice as Tall was produced in part by Sean Combs. It featured Chris Martin, Stormzy, Youssou N’Dour and Naughty by Nature. Burna Boy had spent the previous cycle building an arena-level touring base across Europe and North America. The Grammy did not validate any of that. The Grammy caught up to it.

The lesson was absorbed quickly across Lagos, Johannesburg, Accra and Nairobi. A Grammy was no longer the ceiling. It was a marker on a longer path, and the path included festival headline slots, Madison Square Garden sellouts and chart positions on the Hot 100. Burna Boy did not just win a Grammy. He demonstrated that an African artist could build a career where the Grammy was one stop rather than the destination.

The Post-Burna Generation Reads the Map

Davido received three Grammy nominations at the 2024 ceremony, among the most any Nigerian artist has held in a single year. He was up for Best Global Music Album for Timeless, Best Global Music Performance for Feel, and Best African Music Performance for Unavailable with Musa Keys. He won none of them. The nominations still told the industry that his commercial dominance in Africa had translated into Academy recognition, which had not previously been true for him at any point in a decade of hits.

Tems is a different case. She won Best Melodic Rap Performance in 2023 for Wait for U with Future and Drake, becoming the first African woman to win in a rap field. She then won Best African Music Performance in 2025 for Love Me JeJe, with Born in the Wild also nominated for Best Global Music Album that year. Her Grammy record now spans a rap category, an African category and a global category, which is a wider spread than any of her continental peers hold.

The Quiet Revolution Inside the Recording Academy

A Grammy nomination is decided by Recording Academy members. The voting body numbers in the low thousands and is made up of producers, songwriters, engineers and performing artists who have been vetted through a peer-review process. For most of the Academy’s history, the African contingent inside that membership was small enough to count by hand.

That has changed. The Academy has run a public expansion programme aimed at Africa and the Middle East, recruiting members across the continent and the diaspora and publicising the effort through its own newsroom. The new members include Nigerian A&Rs, South African producers and East African label executives, and they vote in the genre fields where their expertise lives. Exact headcounts are not disclosed year by year, but the direction of travel is documented, and it is the practical reason Best African Music Performance has a credible voter pool rather than a nominal one.

The Black Coffee Parallel

Two years before Tyla’s win, the South African DJ and producer Black Coffee won Best Dance/Electronic Album in 2022 for Subconsciously. The win received less coverage than Burna Boy’s, but it was arguably more significant for what it proved. A South African house producer could win a Grammy in a category that had nothing to do with global, world or African music. He won it because enough Academy voters in the dance field thought it was the best dance album of the year.

Black Coffee’s win opened a door that Tyla, Tems and the next generation are now walking through. The doors that matter are the genre doors, not the geographic ones. The geographic categories function as a starting point. The destination is everywhere else on the ballot, and the record now shows African artists winning in country, dance, rap and global fields.

The Collaborations That Built the Bridge

Tems’ Grammy trajectory was built partly on collaborations. Her vocal on Wait for U earned the 2023 Melodic Rap win. Her writing credit on Rihanna’s Lift Me Up for the Black Panther: Wakanda Forever soundtrack earned an Oscar nomination and Grammy recognition in the same season. Her appearance on Beyonce’s Mood 4 Eva from The Lion King: The Gift had already put her in the orbit of one of the most powerful pop artists of her generation.

Rema’s Calm Down with Selena Gomez took a different path. The original solo version was already a hit in Nigeria when Mavin released the remix in August 2022. The remix climbed to number three on the Billboard Hot 100 and spent more than fifty weeks on the chart. It was nominated for Best African Music Performance at the 2024 ceremony and lost to Water. Fans still argue that a song that lived in the global top ten for months deserved a wider berth on the ballot, which is a fair opinion rather than a documented failing by the Academy.

The Beyonce Pipeline

Beyonce’s The Lion King: The Gift, released in 2019, pulled a long list of African artists into an American blockbuster project. Wizkid, Burna Boy, Mr Eazi, Tiwa Savage, Salatiel, Yemi Alade and Tekno all appeared on it, and the album was nominated for Best Pop Vocal Album at the 2021 Grammys. For several of those artists it was the first time their work sat on a ballot at all.

The through line is access rather than charity. Placement on a major American project puts a name in front of voters who would not otherwise encounter it, and it puts an African credit into the paperwork that the Academy actually processes. A decade of that kind of placement is part of why the current generation of African nominees arrived at the Grammys already legible to the voting body.

The Label Politics

Universal Music Group acquired a majority stake in Mavin Records in early 2024, in a deal widely reported at around two hundred million dollars, giving UMG controlling interest in a roster that includes Rema, Ayra Starr, Crayon, Magixx and Bayanni. Sony Music had already invested in Mr Eazi’s emPawa Africa. Warner Music had partnered with Chocolate City. The three major labels now hold meaningful African positions, and those positions come with campaign budgets.

A Grammy campaign is not a passive process. It involves getting recordings in front of voting members, listening events in Los Angeles and New York, trade advertising and weeks of strategic press placement. African artists without major label backing struggled to mount real campaigns because the infrastructure did not exist locally. With UMG, Sony and Warner active on the continent, that infrastructure now exists, and the nomination lists reflect it.

The Asake Question

Asake’s Mr Money With The Vibe was reported at the time to have been submitted for Best Global Music Album consideration and left off the final ballot in 2023. The Recording Academy never publicly explained the decision, and industry commentary at the time suggested the album’s hip-hop and amapiano elements made it awkward to classify under the global framework. Those reports were never confirmed by the Academy, and they should be read as reporting rather than record.

What is documented is that Asake was nominated in the first Best African Music Performance field, for Amapiano with Olamide, the year after. The practical lesson circulating in Lagos was that African artists could not rely on the Academy to find the right category for their music. They had to make the categorisation argument themselves, with label teams who understood the rulebook.

Where the Record Stands After the 68th Ceremony

The 68th Grammy Awards, held at the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles on 1 February 2026 and hosted by South African comedian Trevor Noah, produced the clearest snapshot yet of where African music sits on the ballot.

The weekend opened with Fela Kuti receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Special Merit Awards, the first African artist ever given that honour by the Recording Academy. His children, including Femi Kuti, accepted on his behalf. For a family with a long history of Grammy nominations and no competitive win, it was a resolution of sorts, and it placed Afrobeat’s founding figure inside the Academy’s own canon rather than adjacent to it.

Tyla then won Best African Music Performance for Push 2 Start, becoming the first artist to take the category twice. The field she beat was the deepest the category has assembled: Burna Boy with Love, Davido and Omah Lay with With You, Eddy Kenzo and Mehran Matin with Hope & Love, and Ayra Starr and Wizkid with Gimme Dat. Burna Boy was also nominated for Best Global Music Album with No Sign of Weakness, his eleventh Grammy nomination, alongside Senegal’s Youssou N’Dour. Neither won. Angelique Kidjo was nominated for Best Global Music Performance for her reading of Jerusalema and did not win either.

Two artists of Nigerian heritage did take statuettes in general fields. Shaboozey won Best Country Duo/Group Performance for Amen with Jelly Roll and used his acceptance to speak about immigration in the United States. Tyler, the Creator, whose father is Nigerian, won the first Best Album Cover award for Chromakopia. Neither win was filed under anything geographic, which is the point.

The Infrastructure Behind the Artists

Behind the artists sits a generation of African managers, A&Rs, label executives and publicists who have spent years learning Grammy season from the inside. They sponsor new member applications from the continent, argue for category changes, book the listening sessions and file the submissions correctly. None of them walk across the stage. The clearest evidence of their work is that African nominees now appear in fields where no African name used to be entered at all.

What the Ballot Looks Like Now

Count it plainly. One African-specific category, won by a South African twice and a Nigerian once in its first three years. A global album category where Burna Boy is now on his eleventh nomination and Youssou N’Dour remains a fixture. A rap win for Tems, a dance win for Black Coffee, a country win for Shaboozey and an album cover win for Tyler, the Creator. A Lifetime Achievement Award for Fela Kuti, given four decades after the records that earned it.

That spread is the actual story, and it is a more interesting one than a single breakthrough narrative. African music no longer needs one category to be visible at the Grammys, because it is now scattered across the ballot in places the Academy never built a bracket for. The African Music Performance trophy is where the continent competes with itself. The rest of the ceremony is where the argument has moved.