Exploring The Relationship Between Music & Dance In Afrobeats.

Music as an artform is an expression of language with various features. Taking a trip down memory lane to examine certain genres encountered in African Music along the way, the likes of Azonto to Shaku Shaku, Mapouka to Amapiano, have always been accompanied with iconic dance moves. Some say a major characteristic of a good song is its ability to get you on your feet to dance, how much of a vibe it is to groove to, and its soulful elements. The frenzy and unbridled excitement attached to it are a science that is yet to be explained. 

Africa’s music legacy has been one of the most diverse and vibrant since the dawn of time. Our diverse heritage and ethnicity reflect a rich variety of traditions and cultures defined by various sounds and dance movements across the continent. Even on an ethnic level, we are people who love to dance as a means of self-expression and a way of life. Quite frankly, Africa arguably has the most diverse soundscape, accompanied by various dance movements. Ghana’s “Fontofrom” (a dance of victory, harassment, and achievement on the field) was pioneered by Kumasi, the “Jùjù Music” of Nigeria, the “Gqoms” and “Kwaitos” of South Africa, and many more. It is very evident that the prowess of creativity resides heavily on the continent, and again, it tells you how music artists and dance influencers have always been a match made in heaven. 

“Dance-preneur,” a term used loosely in recent times within pop culture, has seen a major rebrand from being just a collective of people who enjoy dancing to their favorite songs to it becoming a major brick in the marketing plans of most music rollouts. As mentioned earlier, the business of music and dance being nail and hammer has been a tale as old as time. The evolution of traditional dance movements to urban dance movements such as cracking, crip walking, jerking, etc., mostly adopted during high school by teens during entertainment shows, has pioneered some of the most globally acclaimed dance movements, ushering in a new wave of soundscape dominance across the globe. The term “Afro-Dance” was coined to refer dance routines that accompany Afrobeats music. Some of the biggest Afrobeats songs over the last few years have always had their own dance routines, which makes it easier for people to dance along to these songs. Zlatan’s “Zanku,” Davido’s “Skelewu,” Sarkodie’s “Azonto,” Kwamz & Flava’s “Shoo,” Mr. Eazi’s “Akwaaba,” and very recently Davido’s “Unavailable” have all come with dance routines that have propelled the songs and chalked milestones like celebrated footballers using these dance routines as a form of celebration whenever they score a goal.

 Over the years, dancers like The Gentlemen Dance Crew, from which we have two of Africa’s biggest dancers, Incredible zigi and Dancegodlloyd are part of a larger pool of dancers, including Poco Lee and Soft from Nigeria, Endurance Grand, Afronitaa and a host of dancers pushing Afrobeats and their accompanying dance moves through the creation of dance routines and trends. We also need to acknowledge certain dancers who also paved the way like Paa Tee from Ghana, Bontle Modiselle from South Africa, Khaffy Dance from Nigeria, Regina Aigbe and the two masked dancers who heavily contributed to the Azonto renaissance.

Many are still in a dilemma as to what the importance of dance-preneurship is to urban culture and the scale of influence it wields in this age of media and technology, but it is also lost on many how modern society has impacted and spotlighted the creators worthy of recognition. Someone might ask, “Who determines their worth?” Well, its the followers or fans; however you might want to call it, transforming their support into data that reflects that scale of influence. On many occasions, scores downplay the level of importance “dance-preneurship” holds in music marketing. I believe this outrage is a result of the recent isolation of both music and dance as separate disciplines, instead of lumping them under one umbrella as we have always known. Ideally, this comes as an add-on to redefining stakeholdership within the music business.

A casual sentiment being strongly considered by the other sections of the divide suggests that without “dance-preneurship,” music marketing wouldn’t be that effective. If you’ve been tuned in recent discourse, you might have noticed the increasing outpour from some dance enthusiasts about artistes and their management heavily dumping the weight of promotion on them while they lazy around. This notion has played into certain mundane remuneration packages (royalty shares) offered to dancers in recent times to engage their services, especially for indie artistes looking to manage tight marketing budgets. In Ghana today, engaging the services of an average dance influencer could cost you anywhere from $600 and above per video. While that might not be an outrageous sum to charge, proper research can inform choosing the ideal dance influencer for a project to achieve good results as opposed to relying on just vanity metrics.This keen observation points to the fact that most managers immediately opt for dancers with huge following without proper scrutiny of what the true conversion rates of these influencers are. Interestingly, not all dance influencer engagements yield the intended results for some music marketing projects. 

In marketing parlance, an influencer’s ability to influence the decisions of others to take the desired action the sponsor of the ad expects mostly rests on the expertise or knowledge of the influencer within a particular field, reach, authentic relationship with the audience, status, and authority. For no dime, we take the trouble to highlight a few guidelines that artists and their management could use to evaluate the right dance influencer about marketing and promotion of projects:

1. Research the influencer’s audience and demographics to determine their degree of engagement and trust.
2. Make sure the influencer is someone who is perceived by their audience and the general public as credible and trustworthy.
3. Be sure to find the fan conversion rates of influencers, engagement rates, and other relevant metrics. 
4. Type of genre (highlife, afrobeats, trap, etc.) the dance influencer dabbles in and what genres seem more appealing to their audience through sentiment analysis. 

It is noteworthy to carefully scrutinize vanity metrics such as following, follower acquisition, likes, etc as these have proven time and again not to be entirely reliable metrics.

Written by: Nana Kojo Mula & Allen Kwesi Adjei