AbFad on Why Afrobeats’ Global Rise Means Nothing Without Visual Identity to Back It Up
By: Olga Amraie
The Sierra Leonean songwriter, artist, and director on the gap between music and momentum, and why most rising Afrobeats artists are leaving opportunity on the table.
Afrobeats has spent the last several years moving from a regional sound to a genuinely global commercial force, and almost every conversation about that rise focuses on the same things: streaming numbers, crossover collaborations, and festival bookings. AbFad, the Sierra Leonean songwriter, artist, and director born in London, thinks the industry is asking the wrong question. The issue isn’t whether Afrobeats can go global. It already has. The issue is how many of the artists riding that wave are building anything that outlasts a single hit.
“Afrobeats is having its moment globally, but a moment isn’t a career,” AbFad says. “I’ve seen artists get a song that travels everywhere, and a year later, nobody remembers their name, because the song was the whole strategy. There was nothing underneath it.”
A Sound Built Across Four Countries, Not One Scene
AbFad’s perspective on the genre’s trajectory is shaped directly by his own background. Raised across Sierra Leone, Botswana, Namibia, and Uganda before establishing himself in the industry, his sound draws from a wider net than most artists working in a single regional scene. Southern African Kwaito, Western Hip Hop and R&B, and the rhythmic foundations of West African Afrobeats all show up in his catalog. That range became his entry point into the genre’s bigger international conversations, including his breakout collaboration with Nigerian star MC Galaxy on “Sugar Banana,” and later work with Ghanaian highlife star Bisa Kdei.
“Growing up in that many places forces you to stop thinking of music as one box,” he explains. “I was never going to make a record that only made sense in one country, because I never grew up in just one country. That ended up being the thing that opened doors for me internationally, not despite the range, because of it.”
The Problem: Artists Are Treated as Talent, Not as Brands
Pressed on what he sees as the biggest structural problem facing rising Afrobeats artists right now, AbFad doesn’t point to the music industry’s usual suspects (streaming payouts or playlist politics). He points to a gap in visual and narrative infrastructure.
“A song can travel on its own for a few months. After that, people need a reason to keep paying attention, and that reason is almost never just the music,” he says. “It’s the story, the visuals, the sense of who this person actually is. Most artists have no plan for that part. They think a label or a viral moment will handle it for them, and it won’t.”
This is precisely the gap AbFad has built a second career addressing, as a music video director for artists including Dammy Krane, Friday the Cell Phone Man, and Young Paris of Roc Nation. Operating on both sides of the camera gives him a vantage point most artists never get: he’s seen firsthand which visual choices actually extend an artist’s relevance, and which ones are just expensive decoration.
“Directing other artists taught me more about my own career than anything else has,” he says. “You start to see the pattern. The artists who treat their visual identity as seriously as their sound are the ones still working five years later. The ones who treat video as an afterthought usually are not.”
His Advice for Artists Trying to Build Longevity, Not Just a Moment
AbFad is specific about what he thinks artists, particularly those riding Afrobeats’ international wave right now, need to prioritize if they want a career instead of a viral cycle:
• Build a visual identity before you need one. “By the time a song blows up, it’s too late to figure out who you are visually,” he says. “That has to be established before the moment hits, not scrambled together afterward.”
• Treat collaborations as narrative, not just reach. According to AbFad, the artists who benefit most from features and collaborations are the ones who use them to build a coherent story across markets, not just to borrow another artist’s audience for a single song cycle.
• Own your narrative instead of outsourcing it. “Labels and managers can help, but if you don’t have a clear sense of your own story, somebody else will write it for you, and you usually won’t like the version they write,” he says.
• Don’t treat directing, styling, or visual decisions as someone else’s department. AbFad argues that artists who stay involved in their own visual direction, even when they’re not the ones behind the camera, end up with a much stronger, more consistent identity over time.
Music as Cultural Export, Not Just Content
Beyond individual career strategy, AbFad sees his work, and Afrobeats more broadly, as part of a larger cultural export moment. “This isn’t just music doing well overseas,” he says. “It’s African identity, African visual language, and African storytelling reaching rooms they didn’t have access to ten years ago. That’s bigger than any one song or any one artist’s numbers.”
It’s a framing that connects directly back to his core critique: if the industry treats this moment as purely a commercial wave to ride, it will move on the way commercial waves always do. If artists and the people building around them treat it as an identity and a body of work to develop, it has the foundation to last well beyond the current cycle of attention.
What’s Next
AbFad continues to work across both music and visual direction, with new releases and directing projects in motion alongside the international collaborations that first brought him wider attention. His through-line across both sides of the camera remains the same: sound and visual identity aren’t separate jobs for an artist serious about longevity. They’re the same job, done well or done carelessly.
Website: Culture X Capital
