How ‘Amapiano’, South Africa’s soulful sound, has become one of the hottest new music genres

Seeping out of car windows and overflowing from clubs, Amapiano is more than a genre of music — it is influencing style and dance and making an impact on South Africa’s music industry. Believed to have started in 2012, this underground trend exploded in popularity during the Covid-19 pandemic, and has been on the rise ever since.”We noticed a lot of our youths at the end of 2019 starting to use Amapiano music to create their food videos, their dance videos, their fashion videos, memes. And we really saw people embracing the genre and wanting to engage with it,” says Yuvir Pillay, music operations manager at TikTok South Africa.He says Amapiano is the country’s biggest musical genre on TikTok “We haven’t seen a local music genre take over a platform in this kind of huge escalation in a very long time,” he adds.Now the sound is spreading beyond borders. In 2021, videos using the hashtag #Amapiano flexed their muscles on the popular app with more than “The visual representation of Amapiano is such that it breeds from a ground of familiarity,” she says. “You’ll see a lot of Kwaito-esque movements that are reimagined in the look of Amapiano today.”At the same time, that inviting style makes it accessible. “It just allows a culture where anyone, from anywhere, of any age can get together and do the same moves and feel like they’re a part of the same story,” she adds.Yet success for women in Amapiano hasn’t come easily. Mandisa Radebe, who goes by the stage name Those platforms such as Spotify, YouTube and TikTok — which saw a boost in users during the pandemic — also push the supply of music to listeners regardless of where they live. In 2021, Spotify’s flagship Amapiano playlist saw a streaming increase of 622% in South Africa alone, while the UK and US ranked second and third respectively with the most streams of that same playlist.”In 20 years’ time, when we all look back at this period in time when we speak about the pandemic, Amapiano is going to be one of those things that comes up in conversation.” says YouTube host AshMopedi. “I feel that it’s one of those genres that just a mainstay, it’s not going to go anywhere.”The genre is a “lifestyle,” adds Radebe, and though Amapiano is going global, it’s important to remember where it came from.”It’s a culture. It’s a saving grace. It is a lifeline,” she says. “I think it’s really important that we don’t change the narrative, twist the narrative of the fact that this is a South African sound — that this is nurtured, it is built, it is grown here.”