Spotify’s African Heat has been the platform’s flagship playlist for African music since 2017. Among its top ten markets are the United States, the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands and Canada. Nigeria and Kenya lead on the continent itself.

That list is the whole argument. The biggest rooms this music plays to are in London, New York, Paris, Amsterdam and Toronto, full of Africans, their children and everyone they brought with them. The diaspora did not find Afrobeats after it went global. The diaspora is a large part of how it got there.

Yet nearly every system built to measure and reward the music points the other way. There are now at least three serious Afrobeats charts and each is locked to one territory: the Official UK Afrobeats Chart, launched in 2020 with Afro Nation, counting British sales and streams; Billboard’s U.S. Afrobeats Songs chart, from 2022, counting American ones; and TurnTable’s Nigerian chart, counting in-country streams and airplay. Each is reasonable on its own. Together they mean an artist whose listeners sit across Peckham, Houston, Paris and Lagos is partly counted three times and fully counted nowhere, while an artist with one enormous home market registers at full strength and exports that number everywhere.

The awards have the same logic with better manners. Diaspora categories tend to appear for reasons other than the artists, usually tied to wherever a ceremony happens to be held that year. In Britain, the MOBOs have honoured African music for over a decade, and Fuse ODG won that category in 2014 when the shortlists still carried artists building careers in the UK. Lately the single African slot has gone to Asake, Ayra Starr and Wizkid. None of them is undeserving. But one place on a British list, filled each year by the largest acts Lagos has exported, is not a door for a British artist of African descent. It is a queue she cannot reach the front of.

The pattern is hard to miss. The industry treats the diaspora as a market and not as a scene: good enough to stream the records and fill the arenas on the European leg, not quite counted as part of the creative story.

Princess Wonda is a useful case. The British-Nigerian artist has been releasing since January 2020, has placed songs with Amazon Prime Video’s Harlem and HBO Max’s Young Love, headlined Afro Summer Jam in Zurich, sold out Omeara in London, carries more than a quarter of a million monthly listeners and passed three million streams on her EP Magic Hour within a fortnight. Six years of that, in exactly the markets where African Heat does its best numbers, and recognition has consistently arrived later than the work. The first body to count her properly is the Diaspora Creatives Awards, whose inaugural ceremony is in Atlanta on 21 November and where she holds eight nominations. That somebody has finally started is good. That it took until a first edition is the point.

None of this needs another parallel show. It needs awards bodies to treat diaspora recognition as a principle rather than a courtesy to a host city, chart compilers to publish a cross-territory picture, and platforms to let their editorial reflect their own data about where this audience lives.

Afrobeats won the argument that it deserved to be taken seriously abroad. The unfinished part is taking its own people abroad seriously.