Nigerian superstar Burna Boy has written another chapter into the record books of African music, becoming the first artist from the continent to cross the 50 million monthly listener mark on Spotify.
The milestone landed on Monday, and it caps a run that has seen the Grammy winner’s numbers climb at a pace rarely seen from an African act on the platform.
The engine behind this surge has a name: “Dai Dai,” Burna Boy’s collaboration with Colombian pop icon Shakira. The song has topped Spotify’s Global Top Songs chart since peaking at number one on June 30, and it made Burna Boy the first African artist to top that chart since Wizkid did so through his 2016 collaboration with Drake on “One Dance.”
The record he now holds didn’t come out of nowhere; it was built in stages. Just days earlier, South African singer Tyla held the previous African benchmark, having reached 46.58 million monthly listeners in December 2025.
Burna Boy overtook that mark and kept climbing, passing through figures like 46.84 million and 47.3 million before ultimately breaking through 50 million.
“Dai Dai” has become inseparable from the ongoing FIFA World Cup, having served as one of the tournament’s anthems. The track’s reach has extended well beyond audio streaming it recently made history as the first music video to surpass 300 million views on YouTube in 2026.
The collaboration has proven just as transformative for Shakira. She recently crossed 100 million monthly listeners on Spotify for the first time in her career, becoming only the second Latino artist to reach that level after Bad Bunny.
With the World Cup running through July 19 and its final scheduled at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, both artists’ numbers may still have room to grow before the tournament’s curtain falls.
This isn’t an isolated spike for Burna Boy it fits into a pattern of dominance he’s built over recent years. In 2025, he posted 1.986 billion streams on Spotify across the year, the highest single-year total ever recorded by an African artist on the platform, ahead of Wizkid’s 1.81 billion and Tyla’s 1.67 billion.
He is also the first African artist to have two studio albums individually surpass one billion streams on Spotify.
For an artist who has spent years pushing Afrobeats into arenas once considered off-limits to African music, the 50-million-listener milestone reads less like a one-off achievement and more like confirmation of a trajectory, one that continues to redraw expectations for what African artists can achieve on the world’s biggest streaming stage.
WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW
Burna Boy’s rise to 50 million monthly Spotify listeners, a first for any African artist, comes down to one driving factor: his World Cup collaboration with Shakira, “Dai Dai.”
The song’s dominance on Spotify’s Global Top Songs chart and its record-breaking YouTube numbers didn’t just boost Burna Boy it also pushed Shakira past 100 million monthly listeners for the first time in her career.
In short, one song, tied to a global sporting moment, lifted two artists to career-defining milestones and cemented Burna Boy’s place at the top of African music’s streaming history.
