Ayra Starr is one of the biggest global-breakout Afrobeats success stories, with reports this week citing a new milestone: three billion streams on Spotify.
She’s following in the footsteps of peers including Tems, Rema and Davido, although the biggest Afrobeats stars by this metric remain Wizkid (9bn Spotify streams) and Burna Boy (8.5bn).
Starr currently has just over 18 million monthly listeners on the streaming service. While Lagos and Abuja in Nigeria are her two biggest cities for listening on Spotify, third is Mexico City, with London also in the top five.
Spotify recently revealed that Starr was the most popular female Afrobeats artist from the last year, ahead of Tems, Libianca, Aya Nakamura and Darkoo.
“Her record-breaking run on Spotify’s global charts and a more than 3,000% increase in Spotify streams in Nigeria since 2020 highlight her massive appeal,” claimed the streaming service then.
In July this year, Starr signed with Roc Nation in a deal that complements her existing recordings relationship with Mavin Records and UMG, and which is intended to increase her profile even more in the US and Europe.
Spotify is a big part of this story, but it’s far from the only factor in Starr’s global growth.
Her YouTube channel has nearly 2.8 million subscribers, and her music has generated 776m total views on that platform in the last year.
Starr is also reaching fans internationally through Instagram, where she has 6.7 million followers, and TikTok, where she has 8.2 million.
For more on the early work that went into Starr finding an audience outside Nigeria, read our 2023 Behind The Campaign feature.
It explains how Mavin Records and partner Platoon used TikTok, streaming services, carefully-chosen features on albums by other acts, and analysis of all the resulting data to build her initial momentum internationally.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source musically.com ’
