Asake and the O2: How Afrobeats Became a London Ritual

Last Thursday night, 20,000 people filled The O2 for a Lagos artist singing in Yoruba. It is no longer an event for the diaspora. It is part of London's own calendar.

On 15 October, Asake brought his In God We Trust World Tour to The O2 Arena in Greenwich. The show supported M$NEY, his latest album, and it landed in a city that has watched his rise at close range.

London has been part of the Asake story from the start. After his 2022 debut, Mr Money With the Vibe, he sold out three nights at Brixton Academy. By 2023 he was headlining The O2, and he sold it out a second time in September 2024. This summer he took M$NEY to Theatre Royal Drury Lane for a one-night performance with a live orchestra, filmed for a Spotify concert film. Brixton, then the O2, then a West End theatre: he has played London at every scale, and London has kept showing up.

Beyond the diaspora

For a long time, the story of Afrobeats in Britain was a story about belonging. The music was a taste of home for the children of Nigerian, Ghanaian and other African families in Peckham, Barking, Tottenham and beyond. It filled the car on the way to church, the speakers at the wedding and the dance floor at the owambe. It felt like ours, and it was.

That is still true, but it is no longer the whole picture. Look around a crowd like the one at The O2 and you will see the diaspora in full voice, word perfect on every Yoruba line, alongside people with no family link to Lagos at all. They know the songs too. They are not tourists at someone else's party. They have made the party theirs.

That shift matters. A culture becomes part of a city when people with no inherited claim to it start to feel at home in it. Jamaican sound system culture went through that in Britain. So did Bhangra. Afrobeats is now going through it, and Asake is a good case study.

Why Asake works in a room this size

His sound is deeply rooted. It draws on fuji, amapiano and Afropop, and his songs are built on Yoruba storytelling and a church-hall sense of call and response. Little of it is softened for an international ear. It does not need to be. A crowd of 20,000 does not need a translation to know when to shout back. The groove carries the meaning, and the people who do understand the words carry the rest.

His shows are also built as spectacle. His 2024 O2 night opened with a helicopter entrance, and Idris Elba presented him with a sold-out plaque. Wizkid has joined him on stage, and Wizkid, Davido and Burna Boy have all filled the same arena. Burna Boy has gone further still, selling out London Stadium. Asake belongs to a lineage of artists who have made London a second home market, and each one has made the next room easier to fill.

A city that has changed

Not long ago, a Nigerian artist selling out a major London arena would have been treated as a surprise. Now it is almost expected, and the expectation is the real story. Promoters plan around Afrobeats calendars. Radio, streaming and festival bookers treat the genre as mainstream programming, and a Spotify film shot in the West End sits beside the club nights in Brixton and Hackney as part of the same ecosystem.

London has always absorbed the cultures that arrive in it and then quietly reshaped itself around them. Afrobeats is the latest chapter, and it feels less like an import and more like a London sound.

What it means for the rest of us

There is something to be proud of here, and something to protect. Pride is easy. A Nigerian artist can sell out The O2 on his own terms, in his own language, and no one questions whether he belongs there.

Protection is harder. As the music grows, the pressure to smooth it out grows with it. The challenge for artists, promoters and writers is to let the audience widen without letting the sound lose its roots. Asake's success suggests that the roots are the point.

On a Thursday night in Greenwich, 20,000 people sang in a language many of them did not speak, and it did not feel strange. It felt like London.