Tyla vs. Ayra Starr: Who’s Actually Doing Afropop?

On the streets of social media, the battle between the Tygers and the Mobstarrs has been heating up. Their faves’ similar petiteness and star charm, leaving fans in pandemonium and constantly fueling the rivalry. Who is the better vocalist? They ask. Who is the most fashionable? They wonder. Who is actually doing Afropop? They clamour.

Afropop. What Even Is This? A New Sound of Some Sort?

Some say Afropop means the modern, genre-blending sound that broke out of Nigeria and Ghana after 2014; others say it’s an umbrella for over fifty genres across Africa. Although often traced back to artists like Angelique Kidjo and King Sunny Ade, Afropop has long been used to describe African sounds with heavy influence from Western pop, hip-hop, R&B, and electronic elements, propelled in recent years by songs like Wizkid’s “One Dance,” CKay’s “Love Nwantiti,” Rema’s “Calm Down,” and Tems’ “Essence.”

Afropop has grown alongside its closest associated genre — Afrobeats, whose streams grew 349 times over between 2014 and 2025. But many artists, despite sharing almost nothing sonically with the West African sound the term was built to describe, were getting swept under the same umbrella. That led to a wave of pushbacks; Burna Boy went with “Afro-fusion,” CKay tried “Emo-Afrobeats,” Rema chose “Afrorave,” Mr Eazi built “Banku Music.” That surge of rejection formed its own multiplex effect: simultaneous attention and the sprouting of branch genres — Afro-fusion, Afro-dancehall, and, inadvertently, bringing Afropop to the limelight.

Tyla vs. Ayra Starr

One stems from South Africa and the other from Nigeria. Like many beginner artists, they started their professional music career by posting on social media. They have now grown to become important figures in music coming from Africa as a continent, and in an industry dominated by their male counterparts.

Tyla had her international breakthrough in 2023 after releasing “Water.” The song became a viral hit and earned her a Grammy Award for Best African Music Performance in 2024. She has maintained her relevance and built a community of listeners with other projects like TYLA, WWP, and her most recent album APOP*, cementing her place in the industry. Her sound draws from amapiano, bacardi, and R&B, a lineage rooted in South Africa’s own house and dance traditions.

Ayra Starr, signed to Nigerian label Mavin Records, had her global hit with the release of “Rush.” It charted in several countries and earned her a nomination for the inaugural Best African Music Performance Grammy in 2024 — the same category, same ceremony, where Tyla’s “Water” took the win. Starr has also released other notable projects like 19 & Dangerous, The Year I Turned 21, and her most recent, Starrgirl, becoming a force to reckon with. Her sound, by contrast, sits closer to Afrobeats and alté, with R&B woven through the Nigerian pop lineage she came up in.

The two artists might share several similarities than meets the eye. Both born in 2002, Tyla and Ayra Starr have also become fashion sensations — from Ayra’s mini-skirt phase to her more recent purple gele trend, and Tyla’s groundbreaking sand-molded Balmain gown at the 2024 Met Gala, to her more recent album-inspired neon makeup trend. Until recently, though, audiences (Mobstarrs and Tygers) have always compared their style, each side claiming their fave wore it first. This is one of the earliest examples of what might have now become a feud between these two fanbases. They seem unable to imagine a world where Tyla and Ayra are best friends, even with proof of their collaborations. Go look it up!

*The Feud That Is Tyla’s ‘APOP’ — AKA AFRICAN-POP, AKA AFRO-POP

It’s been a common pattern in the music industry: fans pitting two female celebrities against each other to find entertainment outside their music. Funnily, it doesn’t end as long as these figures are in the limelight. This time, for Ayra and Tyla, the argument is about whether Tyla has the right to name her album African-Pop when the music in it allegedly doesn’t sound African. If Tyla names her album “African-Pop,” she’s knowingly promising us an Afro-pop album. It’s an interesting one, because it really forces us to ask: is any Afro-conjoined genre about race, continent, or sound? How do you decide what is Afro-pop?

Tyla’s second album, APOP, is a 14-track statement of intent that blends her signature amapiano rhythms with reverb-heavy guitars, R&B, and electronic production. “Fairytale,*” a reimagining of a Liquideep classic, sounds like an artist looking homeward instead of outward, and “Kiss” moves like a Johannesburg nightclub, all hypnotic rhythm and shimmering synth. Songs like “Crazy of Me,” featuring MaWhoo, touch base and lean into her South African dialectal heritage, while other songs, like “Double Blind” and “She Did It Again,” mostly settle into the same polished pop-R&B sound that made her famous in the first place.

This project, according to Tyla, was intended to bring the A to pop, that African pop is pop, and African music is pop music. She also needed this album as a statement about her hatred for being polished, following rules, and spending a long time believing she had to become something other than herself to qualify as a pop star. So here’s her proving herself yet again. If people like Zainab Nasreen Muhammad, from The Culture Custodian, and Mobstarrs like this X user, really think the album isn’t African enough, then what really is Afropop?

Starrgirl: The Accidental Afro-Pop Album

Well, I didn’t say that; I am just repeating what the internet and Ayra’s Mobstarrs are saying. Starrgirl dropped just 21 days after APOP*. 21 days of simultaneous absorption of what Tyla is, and expectancy of what Ayra would be. Starrgirl, a 16-track project, opens with the amapiano-inflected “Dangerous,” then keeps moving — the sultry R&B of “Amazing,” the suave “Gimme Dat” (where she trades verses with Wizkid over heartstring guitar), the glossy pop of “Pressure” with Leon Thomas. This album mixes core Afrobeats with global R&B, pop, dancehall, and Latin-infused synth-pop, and has been praised for its ambition, cohesiveness, and its “African” lineage. To many (and the Mobstarrs), it felt like the answer to the promise Tyla failed to deliver. It is an obviously misplaced coronation, but two truths can be true.

We Cannot Decide, the Internet Cannot Decide, I Cannot Decide.

Outside of the Mobstarr-Tygers web, there is another set of people who genuinely feel Tyla’s APOP* outlived its name. They are disappointed and dissatisfied because it is too “African”.

So what is Afropop, really? Who is actually doing Afropop? I cannot decide it, but perhaps I could help guide your own resolve to this golden question by observing the genre via three controversial lenses: race, sound, continent. This is important because these factors have great influence on the listener’s perception.

But instead of talking about them individually, I will lump them together because they are genuinely intertwined, and one would always affect the other. Listeners do not only listen to the sound of your music. They listen to the shared experience, the shared identity, story, and image. This is why visuals are so important in today’s industry. They also want to see a part of themselves in what they listen to. It’s not always straightforward, though — I could be from somewhere but have never lived there, and now mostly embody another culture. What if Ayra sounded this exact way, brought up in Nigeria, but she was white? Would she still be considered an Afropop artist? Probably not. Or what if Tyla, a South African, had spent all her years in Japan; would she now be making J-pop?

Ayra and Tyla tick all three boxes. So why’s one more revered than the other? I think the only thing APOP* by Tyla might have lacked is the diversity in the sound itself — the very thing that gives Afropop its encompassing name. Both artists carry their own emotional register and tempo, but where Ayra kept reaching — Afrobeats, alté, dancehall, Latin-tinged synth-pop, all in one album — Tyla curated hers tighter.

Ayra’s breadth may make her feel more conventionally Afropop, but Tyla’s narrower palette doesn’t make APOP* less African. It simply exposes how narrow our expectations of “African” sound can be.