Nigerian show promoter Paulo Okoye set off one of the sharper industry arguments the Afrobeats scene has had in months this week, posting a blunt declaration on Instagram on August 5: “AfroBeat Is Dead. Or Coma. 2026.” By August 9, Davido had weighed in with a two-word putdown, Grammy-nominated talent manager Bankulli had called the claim “faulty” and “bad,” and what started as one promoter’s gripe about booking fees had turned into a public referendum on who actually gets paid in Nigerian music.
What Okoye Actually Said
Okoye, also known as Paul O and a longtime figure on the Nigerian live-events circuit, followed his initial post with a longer explanation. His argument wasn’t that the music itself has gotten worse. It was structural: of the roughly 10,000 artists releasing Afrobeats music, he said, only about ten are making real money from streaming, touring and sales. He pointed to rising artist booking fees as the core problem, arguing that promoters increasingly “no fit book them again” and that even corporate brands are struggling to afford sponsorship at current prices. He also flagged fewer major Afrobeats concerts this past summer compared to prior years, calling live shows “the heartbeat of the industry” and warning that without a more sustainable business model, the pipeline for the next generation of artists narrows.
Notably, Okoye framed this as a systemic issue rather than an attack on any individual artist, promoter or brand, and he did not name names in the original post.
Bankulli and Davido Push Back
The response was immediate and pointed. Bankulli rejected the framing outright: “Nothing is dying as far as we know, they are all buying new cars, building and buying new houses up and down,” he said, adding that “times have changed in the pricing regime of Nigerian artistes” and that promoters who can’t meet current rates simply aren’t the right fit for every artist. His read was that Okoye’s complaint is really about promoter economics shifting, not the genre collapsing, and he pointed to a run of high-attendance shows over the prior two months as evidence Afrobeats is still filling rooms.
Davido’s response was shorter and went viral faster. Commenting directly beneath the discourse, he wrote “PAUL O AKA PAUL BROKE,” a jab that multiple Nigerian outlets, including Daily Post and Legit.ng, led their coverage with. Davido offered no further elaboration, but the comment reframed the entire debate in the way social media reframes most Nigerian celebrity disputes: as a personal shot rather than a policy disagreement, which is arguably part of why it spread as fast as it did.
This Isn’t a New Argument
Okoye has made versions of this case before. In April 2024 he warned that, outside of Burna Boy and Davido, most Nigerian acts were struggling to sell tickets and urged artists to cut their prices before they priced themselves out of the market. He returned to it that October, claiming no more than five Afrobeats artists were actually making money. Pushback eventually came, though not immediately: at an industry event roughly a year later, Tiwa Savage rejected the pessimism from Okoye and others, calling Afrobeats “unstoppable” and pointing to stadiums still filling up. The fact that Okoye is repeating a sharper version of the same warning again in 2026 is arguably the more interesting story than the Instagram spat itself: it suggests a live, unresolved tension inside the industry’s live-events economy, not a one-off complaint.
The Argument Underneath the Insults
Strip out the “broke” jab and the core disagreement is actually a fairly precise one about Nigerian live-music economics. Okoye’s claim is that top-tier artist fees have risen faster than what promoters and sponsors can sustainably pay, which squeezes the middle of the market, fewer shows get booked, and the artists below the top ten have fewer stages to build on. Bankulli’s counter is that pricing has simply repriced around who can actually draw a crowd, and that promoters unwilling or unable to pay current rates aren’t proof of industry decline, just proof the market sorted itself.
Both things can be true at once. A handful of Nigerian acts commanding festival-headliner fees globally is consistent with a genre in genuine ascent. It’s also consistent with a live-circuit bottleneck for the artists who aren’t Burna Boy, Wizkid, Davido or Asake, the same artists most dependent on shows, sync placements and direct fan revenue rather than global streaming numbers to make a living. That’s precisely the layer of the market where distribution economics, direct fan payouts and how quickly an independent artist can get paid actually matter most, and it’s a conversation Nigerian industry figures keep having in public because nobody has settled it in private.
Whether Afrobeats is “dead or in a coma” is, bluntly, not a serious question; the genre’s global chart and streaming numbers this year alone answer that. Whether the machinery that turns a mid-tier Nigerian artist into a headliner is getting harder to access is a much more useful question, and it’s the one Okoye, however clumsily, actually put on the table.
