In the last decade, Afrobeats has become one of the most globally recognizable sounds to emerge from the African continent. Artists like Burna Boy, Wizkid, and Tems have performed in sold-out arenas across Europe and North America, topped international charts, and received recognition from institutions such as the Grammy Awards.
Yet something curious happens when African films engage with global audiences. When African cinema screens at the Cannes Film Festival, streams on Netflix, or is awarded at the BAFTAs, the film’s music rarely reflects the current boom in African popular music. Instead, many films rely on production music libraries mirroring Hollywood conventions.
This raises an important question: if Afrobeats has ascended to global music royalty status, why hasn’t the African film-scoring ecosystem gained a similar foothold?
Historically, African cinema never ignored music. Some of the earliest modern African films experimented with rhythmic structures long before the Afrobeats boom. From ‘60s Senegalese cinema to ‘90s Nollywood, African film music involved indigenous instruments, chants, synthesized keyboard loops, improvised percussion, and locally produced sound effects layered directly onto scenes.
While some of these sonic traditions still pulse through African films, they haven’t scaled up under recognizable infrastructural pipelines. African film composers — classically trained or not — do exist. However, their work often operates in fragmented silos. They create within survival economies, as do many African creative industries.
Award-winning artist-composer Mbuso Khoza, who has a composing credit on Shaka Ilembe, South Africa’s biggest TV production yet, attributes part of the problem to what local creators have available to work with.
“This issue is a lack of resources,” he admits, “When major American and European studios are making a story about Africa, and they come with this big budget in collaboration with local talents, the output is often bigger.”
French composer Cédric Oujagir (Reksider), who scored the Senegalese thriller Saloum, noted that African film scoring lacks the institutional infrastructure found in Hollywood. “I believe major cultural investment is urgently needed. The continent holds incredible talent that could bring a wave of freshness to global cinema,” he says.
Shiloh Godson, a Nigerian sound designer and composer who has scored films like The Blind Spots, agrees. He clarifies that while infrastructural constraints exist, a composer is largely limited by the quality of the projects they are offered.
“If a film looks low-budget, fewer people will see it, and even fewer will pay attention to the score,” he says. “Another issue is the lack of proper accounting structures in the industry, which often skews budgets. The majority of funds tend to go toward production, leaving post-production severely underfunded. As a result, VFX and music in many projects end up subpar, not due to a lack of talent, but because there’s simply no money left to do them justice.”
While film scoring often conjures grand aesthetics, the kind made in Dolby-certified mixing rooms and live orchestras, soundtracks face their own challenges in African films.
Structural Hurdles and the Quest for An Authentic African Sound
In the past, securing licenses for African music in films wasn’t difficult. The same applied to Afrobeats. But with Afrobeats now benefitting from social media virality, chart performance, and streaming numbers, access to major Afrobeats catalogs is becoming harder to license.
“As Afrobeats continues to grow globally, the intellectual property value of many catalogs has increased significantly,” says Unique Oliver, Music Supervisor and Licensing Coordinator at Spring Sound, a music licensing agency. “This can make licensing fees difficult to accommodate within the production budgets available to many African film producers and the music supervisors representing them.”
With a prior working relationship with Mavin Records, Oliver has overseen the licensing of over 100 titles, indicating an appetite for licensed and commissioned music in African cinema.
Because African film and African music as industries evolved independently, a combination of bootstrapping efforts and creative enterprise, they don’t stand evenly on the shoulders of global infrastructural access. This is evident across film industries on the continent, which aren’t structurally optimized to support large-scale, technically complex scoring opportunities.
Therefore, a Hollywood studio commissioning an artist like Tyla or Rema to compose scores — not just soundtracks — for a project wouldn’t be unusual. An African filmmaker may want to ask an Afrobeats artist to create a film score, but major artists are often managed behind layers of label bureaucracy.
Oliver explains: “There needs to be greater flexibility within existing contractual structures. Many artists operate under label and publishing agreements that regulate how their music is created and commercially exploited. Because of this, participating in film scoring projects often requires waivers or approvals from the labels and the publishers, which may not come easily at times.”
There are other concerns, too. Khoza feels there’s a tendency to score African films with too many Western compositional cues. He isn’t against Western sonic influences, he clarifies, but believes the continent’s musical traditions remain vastly underexplored. “We haven’t fully studied ourselves musically as Africans,” he says.
Of Zulu heritage, Khoza points to instruments like the Uhadi, which remain underutilized in film scoring today.
Oujagair couldn't agree more: “When I collaborated with the artist Popiman (Dramane Dembélé), I was blown away by his Malinké instruments and his unique playing techniques. I had never heard those textures in traditional film scoring. The ultimate goal should be to establish a true, continuous exchange between African musicians and the global film industry.”
In some ways, that exchange is already happening, especially in Hollywood-backed, diasporic productions such as Black Panther (Ludwig Göransson) and The Woman King (Terence Blanchard).
African music has long been hybrid and adaptive. In live performances, Afrobeats artists demonstrate this flexibility, transforming club-ready tracks into orchestral or classical arrangements.
Ebuka Omaliko, a Nigerian classically trained singer and alum of The Musical Society of Nigeria (MUSON), is optimistic about these possibilities.
“Imagine orchestra harmonies playing with chants, or talking drums. This could bridge African sacred music, traditional opera, and cinematic scoring,” he says. As Afrobeats continues its global domination, the possibilities for African film scoring are only beginning to surface. The sounds are already here; the industry just has to listen.
