spotify celebrates 10 years of amapiano
website looks at the global growth of the South African genre and its impact on the music industry. It is complemented by an amapiano hub on the platform, offering playlists and podcasts describing the origins, sounds and future of the music genre.
In 2023, amapiano hit over 1.4 billion streams on Spotify, with the period of the COVID-19 pandemic a game-changer. “In 2020, the genre reached its first 100 million streams, followed by 300 million streams in 2021, confirming its growing popularity,” said Spotify.
Coming from the townships and now breaking waves on global stages, amapiano not only has entertainment value, it has become a tool amplifying the voices of young South Africans, who use it to express their aspirations and showcase their resilience and creativity.
“The most recent time we saw a distinctly South African genre paint a clear picture of the state of South African groove culture was with the youth-led kwaito,” said Phiona Okumu, Spotify’s head of music for sub-Saharan Africa.
“What amapiano has managed to bring from the grassroots level to the local level and ultimately to the global level is admirable, not only from a musical point of view but also from a cultural point of view. One of the most positive aspects of the explosion of amapiano over the last decade is to see how people are using it to express themselves”.
Okumu says A Decade of Amapiano reinforces Spotify’s commitment to supporting the growth of local music genres in Africa. Spotify launched the ‘Amapiano’ programme in June last year.
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