For Spotify’s Phiona Okumu, Success Starts with Listening First

It is easy, from the outside, to imagine Phiona Okumu as the kind of woman who moves music around a continent with a few calls. After all, she has served as Spotify’s Head of Music for Sub-Saharan Africa since 2021, stepping into the role as the streaming giant expanded further into the continent. That placed her close to one of the most powerful engines of musical discovery on the continent.

But if you try to hand her the title of tastemaker-in-chief, she pushes it right back.

“I carry the bags for a team of experts,” she tells OkayAfrica in an exclusive interview. “There really is a village of different types of music experts all over Africa.”

That tension is what makes Okumu such a strong fit for OkayAfrica’s The Women Who Decide What Africa Listens To, a series about women in positions of power and leadership in Africa’s music business, where they remain underrepresented. On paper, she fits the title perfectly. But she is careful about the idea that any one person can decide what an entire continent listens to. For her, the job is about paying attention to culture, understanding what is already connecting with people, noticing what is being overlooked, and helping it reach a wider audience.

Okumu was doing this work long before her current role at Spotify. Her career spans African music journalism, curation, and strategy. She admits that she thrives in opportunities where she can launch something. She helped build early digital music platforms like AFRIPOP! (IYKYK!), wrote about music and African pop culture for outlets like The FADER and Pigeons and Planes, DJ’d, and later worked at Apple Music and iTunes before joining Spotify in 2019 as Artist and Label Marketing Lead for Sub-Saharan Africa. By the time she took on her current role — a pioneering position with no blueprint — she had already spent years thinking about how African music moves, how local scenes grow, and how artists’ stories are told.

“It’s been interesting, completely unscripted,” she says about her career. “But that journey is crucial because it told me that discovery is very much a ground up process. Each version of my career has taught me different things about the way music travels. DJing taught me immediacy and what works right now in the moment. Writing taught me context, nuance, and why things matter. And now in this role, it’s really about scaling all of that without losing the nuance.”

That background matters because Okumu does not talk about African music as if it moves in one way. Again and again, she returns to the importance of local context and the different ways listeners encounter music based on where they are.

“Not having a blueprint… offered an opportunity to define what curation should look like in an African context,” she says. “And so for me, this just means that the work is really mostly about listening.” 

 Listening, in her view, is the basis of good curation. Curation is not just about putting songs into playlists. It is about knowing what is connecting with people, and what is starting to grow before the data shows it.

“Data points will often show up after the cultural incident has happened,” she says. “Curation, ultimately, is an act of listening first. It’s not dictation.”

The Act of Responsible Curation

One of the clearest examples of that, she says, is amapiano. Before it became one of South Africa’s biggest musical exports, the genre was still being dismissed by many gatekeepers.

“When we first launched in Africa, this was not music being endorsed by the industry gatekeepers,” she says. “It was purely hand-to-mouth, township taste-fuelled music. A producer would make a song on Monday, test it that same night at Mogodu Mondays in the township. And if it went off, they’d be booked by Friday. That was the entire ecosystem.”

Okumu and a colleague spent time in Johannesburg and Soweto, following how and where amapiano was taking shape. They spoke with small distributors and other music middlemen outside the major labels to understand how songs were moving, who was playing them, and why they were not scaling. Those conversations helped them bring the music onto Spotify in a way that stayed true to what was happening on the ground.

“When there was enough music [on the platform], we curated what is now the biggest amapiano playlist on the continent,” she says of Spotify’s Amapiano Grooves. “It came from there being no data at all to, now, if you want to know the biggest amapiano songs, that’s the playlist you go to. Data didn’t come first. The moment happened first.”

Seen that way, her role is not just to reflect what is already popular.

“Headline stories are not more important than emerging stories,” she says. “In this role, it is not enough to simply reflect what is already popular. It is about reflecting culture responsibly. It is about creating room for breadth, and helping not just bigger, established artists, but more artists and stories find their audience.”

This becomes even clearer when the conversation turns to women in music. Spotify’s five-year snapshots from Kenya, Nigeria, and Ghana showed that female artists remain underrepresented in the top-streamed rankings. Okumu was not surprised. 

“I think that the data underscores what’s real. The work hasn’t been done. Yes, there is some progress,... but progress is not the same as parity,” she says.

For Okumu, the issue goes beyond audience preference. She acknowledges that listener behavior shapes what labels and executives respond to, but argues that the deeper problem is structural. 

“If the decision-makers are skewed to one side, that has a ripple effect on almost everything else that happens in the music industry,” she says. “It goes back to who is senior enough at labels to decide who gets signed, who gets budget, and who gets opportunities. If fewer of those people look like myself, then fewer of the people who look like myself will appear in playlists.”

She adds: “For me as a woman leader, I'm always cognizant of things like, what does my team look like?… What's our representation like at this event? You know, do we have the women that need to be in the room?”

As the conversation winds down, it turns to Okumu’s own identity. Born to Ugandan parents, she has called many parts of the world “home” at one point or another. “I'm Ugandan, but I'm also South African because of the way my tastes were shaped. I am also kind of an honorary West African because I'm partnered with a Ghanaian man. I'm all of these things,” she explains. “ There are also so many other layers, and I think that having a multicultural background that I have has been a game changer in kind of how I've been able to move in the world."

That same openness shapes the way she talks about African music today. What excites her is the growth of discovery and the way local scenes are reaching people far beyond where they started. Like how Tanzania's singeli has found “champions in Berlin,” and that genres like R&B keep evolving through their encounters with Afrobeats and other local forms.

For Okumu, that suggests a musical landscape that is growing wider, not narrower. “You cannot approach Africa as one sound or one audience,” she says.