Sometimes last week, I saw something on Twitter that made me roll on the floor.
This certain Twitter user had tweeted that CKay’s “Love Nwantiti” is the most popular song by an African artist ever. The funniest thing about it is that so many people agreed in the comments. But that is so not true. It’s not true at all.
It’s very easy to pick a viral Nigerian song and imagine that it’s huge in all of Africa because truth be told, we have the largest music market in the whole continent. But the thing is, Nigeria can’t have it all.
The fact is the most popular African song of all time is not a Nigerian song at all and maybe it was popular in Nigeria at the time, so was it in many other countries across the world.
What Is The Most Popular African Song Ever?
The most popular African song of all time is Master KG’s 2019 viral hit, “Jerusalema,” without a doubt. It has the numbers to back it up.
Just on YouTube only, the song’s official video has 485,000,000+ views (no Nigerian artist has ever reached 300M), and if you add the Burna Boy video which has 27M+, that’s well over 500 million views on YouTube alone.
Then if we go further and add the dance videos, two of which have 170M+ and 80M+, that’s about 750M+ views for the “Jerusalema” song on the YouTube platform.
This was a song that reached Number one in Belgium, the Netherlands, Romania, Switzerland, and other European countries. At its peak, it became the most searched song in Shazam history.
The original song currently has 277M+ streams on Spotify, with the Burna Boy Remix having over 50 million streams on the same platform. Do the math and we already have 1B+ streams, just from two platforms.
This is a feat that CKay can only dream of at the moment, sorry. “Love Nwantiti” is a good one, but sleep isn’t the same thing as death.
