Lagos is one of the most important music cities in the world, not just in Africa but on a global scale. The city has produced a generation of artists who dominate streaming charts, headline international festivals, and force the music industry to reframe what mainstream sounds like. In 2024, that momentum accelerated. What was once described as a rising wave is now a permanent tidal force, and Lagos remains at its center of gravity. The artists working out of this city right now are not waiting for an invitation from the rest of the world. They have already arrived.
The Sound That Conquered the World
When people discuss Afrobeats going global, they are really describing Lagos going global. The genre, rooted in the city's dense sonic culture of juju, highlife, and Afrobeat (the movement Fela Kuti built at the old Afrika Shrine in Ikeja), has evolved into something that no longer requires an explainer for international listeners. It is pop music now. Some of its most influential practitioners call Lagos home, and in 2024, they made certain the world could not ignore that fact.
The clearest measure of that impact is Rema's Calm Down, which became the first Afrobeats song to surpass one billion on demand streams in the United States. At the 2024 ASCAP London Music Awards, the track won both Song of the Year and Top Streaming Song. Rema followed that cultural moment by releasing his sophomore album HEIS in 2024, pushing his sound further into global pop while holding onto the textures that made him distinct in the first place.
Asake and the Rise of Street Gospel
Few artists in 2024 captured the Lagos sound with more specificity than Asake. Born Ahmed Ololade and raised in Lagos State, he developed a style that fuses Yoruba spiritual language with contemporary Afrobeats production, creating something that feels both ancient and immediate. His debut album under YBNL Nation became the highest charting debut album by a Nigerian artist in Billboard history, a record that established him as something more than a promising new voice.
In June 2024, he announced the Lungu Boy World Tour alongside his third studio album Lungu Boy, released in August. He appeared on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert in February 2024, a moment that confirmed his arrival in the American mainstream. His commitment to his craft, and to Lagos as the foundation of that craft, runs through everything he makes. By 2025, he had launched an independent label called Giran Republic, an act of creative self determination that many artists in his position would not dare.
Ayra Starr and the New Mavin Royalty
Ayra Starr released The Year I Turned 21 in May 2024, and it stands as one of the most fully realized albums from the Lagos music ecosystem in that period. Signed to Mavin Records, the label Don Jazzy founded in 2012 and which has become the city's most powerful musical institution, she built an album of collaborations with Giveon, Asake, Coco Jones, and Anitta that stretched its reach across continents without losing its emotional center. The album spans fifteen tracks and finds a singer who already knows exactly who she is and what she wants to say.
One of those tracks, Lagos Love Story, is almost literally a love letter to the city. It grounds an internationally ambitious album in something specific and local. Ayra Starr's sound moves between Afrobeats, pop, and R&B, and she has become one of the most visible representatives of a generation of women who are actively reshaping what the Lagos music scene looks and sounds like from within.
Victony and the Stubborn Spirit
Victony, born Anthony Ebuka Victor in Ojo, Lagos, released his debut studio album Stubborn in June 2024. The album brought together collaborations with Asake and SAINt JHN, and it received a nomination for Album of the Year at the African Entertainment Awards USA. His trajectory is one of the more remarkable in recent Lagos music history. After surviving a serious car accident early in his career, he returned with a series of releases that built slowly and steadily toward that debut album. The stubbornness in the title is not rhetorical.
His 2022 song Soweto, recorded with Tempoe, went viral globally and led to a remix with Rema and Don Toliver that charted in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Canada. By the time Stubborn arrived in 2024, those who had followed him from the beginning recognized the payoff: a confident, versatile artist who moves between Afrobeats, trap, and R&B without sounding like he is reaching for any of them.
The Alte Underground and Female Voices
Beyond the mainstream chart successes, Lagos maintains a thriving underground that is harder to quantify but just as vital. The alte scene, a loose musical and aesthetic movement drawing from alternative music, Afrobeats, art pop, and electronic influences, has been producing challenging and inventive work for years. In 2024, artists like Deto Black continued to push it forward. A Lagos based rapper, model, and photographer, she released Love Is Wicked, an EP centered on themes of love and loss, and a collaboration with Somadina titled Lagos. Her sound pulls from hip hop, Afrobeats, rock, and pop simultaneously, and her connections with artists like Odunsi the Engine and Amaarae have helped define what the alte scene means in practice.
SGaWD is another Lagos based voice who carried considerable momentum into 2024. A former lawyer who left that career behind to pursue music, she creates a sound that fuses hip hop with the alte aesthetic, and her 2024 track BoyToy showed an artist who is precise about what she wants to make and how she wants to make it. The female rap scene in Lagos is small but resistant. SGaWD, Deto Black, Miss November, Phlow, and Candy Bleakz are all building bodies of work that challenge the formulas dominating the mainstream, and they are doing it without waiting for permission from an industry that mostly overlooks them.
The Venues That Hold It All
The music scene in Lagos has physical roots that matter. The New Afrika Shrine in Ikeja, now managed by Femi Kuti and Seun Kuti, the sons of Fela, remains the most symbolically important live music venue in the country. It connects the city's present sound to the Afrobeat revolution of the 1970s and continues to host performances by both established and emerging artists every week. Freedom Park on Lagos Island, a converted colonial prison turned cultural space, hosted the Lagos Freedom Fest on October 1, 2024. These are not nostalgia projects. They are working stages where the city continues to figure out what it sounds like.
What Lagos Means Now
In 2024, Lagos is not just a city that produces great music. It is a city that sets direction for popular music globally. Its artists work across multiple registers, reaching listeners in Seoul and Sao Paulo and Stockholm without needing to simplify or translate what makes their work distinctly Lagosian. The refusal to compromise is itself a kind of argument. The artists shaping this city right now are not making music to fit into someone else's framework. They are building a new one, and the rest of the world has begun arranging itself around what they create.
