Data Is the New A&R — And Africa Is Just Waking Up to It
For decades, the music industry ran on instinct.
A label executive would attend a show, hear a demo, feel the energy in a room, and decide whether an artist had “it.” That role was called A&R, short for Artists and Repertoire. In simple terms, A&R meant finding talent and helping shape their music into something commercially viable.
It was part scouting, part taste-making, part career engineering.
Today, that job still exists.
But the first scout in the room is no longer a human.
It is data.
What A&R Used to Mean
Traditionally, A&R executives did four things:
Discovered new artists
Helped them refine their sound
Selected which songs made the album
Connected them to producers, studios, and collaborators
They were the filter between raw talent and the market.
Their power came from relationships, ear training, and access.
Now, their power increasingly comes from dashboards.
The Dashboard Is the New Demo Tape
Before a label signs an artist today, they check:
Weekly streaming growth
Listener retention rates
Skip rates
Geographic audience clusters
TikTok sound adoption
Playlist traction
If a song is gaining traction in London, Toronto, and Nairobi simultaneously, that is not a vibe. That is leverage.
If listeners finish 90 percent of a track instead of skipping after 30 seconds, that is market validation.
The data now speaks before the executive does.
That is what it means to say data is the new A&R.
TikTok Sounds: The New Radio
If streaming data is the dashboard, TikTok is the engine running underneath it.
A decade ago, getting a song on radio was the industry’s golden ticket. Airplay drove discovery. Discovery drove sales. Sales drove careers.
That pipeline still exists. But a new one has grown around it, faster and harder to ignore.
When a sound goes viral on TikTok, it does not just spread. It compounds. A single clip becomes ten thousand clips. A moment becomes a movement. And by the time a label executive notices the spike in streaming numbers, the audience has already made the decision for them.
TikTok did not just change how people find music. It changed who gets to decide what is popular.
How TikTok Turns Sounds Into Commercial Signals
The mechanics matter here.
On TikTok, a “sound” is a shareable audio unit. Any user can attach it to their video. When enough users do that — for a dance, a meme, an emotional moment — the sound becomes a cultural shorthand. It spreads with context attached, which is far more powerful than passive listening.
That spread generates data that the music industry now reads like a map:
Sound adoption rate: How quickly creators are picking up the audio after it first appears
Video creation volume: How many original videos are using the sound
Cross-platform migration: Whether TikTok virality is translating into Spotify saves, Apple Music streams, or YouTube views
Demographic signals: Who is creating with the sound, not just who is listening to it
A song that generates three million TikTok videos is not just popular. It is commercially proven. Brands want it for campaigns. Sync supervisors want it for TV placements. Streaming platforms want to push it into editorial playlists.
Virality on TikTok is no longer a cultural moment. It is a commercial credential.
The Sound Before the Deal
This is where the shift becomes most significant for artists and their teams.
In the old model, the label deal came before the audience. An A&R executive believed in the artist, signed them, invested in production, and then introduced them to the market.
In the new model, the audience can come first.
Artists are building TikTok presence before they have distribution deals. Producers are releasing beats as TikTok sounds before they attach an artist. A fifteen-second clip recorded on a phone can attract more attention than a professionally produced music video.
Labels are now watching TikTok the way they used to watch open mic nights.
The difference is scale. An open mic night held two hundred people. TikTok holds two billion.
What This Means for African Artists
African music has never been more globally visible.
Afrobeats fills international arenas. Amapiano dominates dance floors across continents. Francophone African pop continues to expand across Europe. Diaspora consumption keeps rising.
But visibility is not the same as control.
African artists have experienced TikTok virality firsthand. Rema’s “Calm Down” became a TikTok phenomenon long before it charted globally. Libianca’s “People” exploded on the platform and crossed over into mainstream markets that traditional A&R pipelines would have taken years to reach. Tyla’s “Water” turned a TikTok dance trend into a Grammy-winning breakthrough.
In each case, the audience moved first. The industry followed.
The question is not whether African music can go viral on TikTok. It clearly can, and regularly does.
The question is who is reading the signals, who is structuring the deals that follow, and who ultimately captures the value that virality creates.
Much of the data infrastructure shaping those decisions still sits outside the continent. Global labels use analytics to identify African talent early, often stepping in once the TikTok numbers cross certain thresholds.
The artist trends locally.
The deal gets structured globally.
If African managers, labels, and investors are not studying the same data with the same rigor, they are negotiating from behind.
Streaming Numbers Are Strategy
Streaming data is no longer just vanity metrics.
It determines:
Touring routes
Brand partnerships
Distribution deals
Publishing negotiations
Advance sizes
And TikTok data now sits alongside streaming data as a primary input in these decisions.
Promoters now ask for streaming heat maps before confirming shows. Brands analyze engagement quality before signing ambassadors. Investors review performance history before backing catalogs. And all of it increasingly begins with a TikTok signal that either confirms or questions whether the momentum is real.
Data reduces risk.
And in an industry built on risk, that changes everything.
The Creator Economy Is Also the Music Economy
One more layer worth understanding.
TikTok did not just create a new promotional channel. It created a new economy where music and content are inseparable.
Creators who use sounds build audiences. Artists who supply those sounds build reach. The line between musician and content creator is blurring in ways that require new thinking from African talent and their managers.
An Afrobeats producer who uploads a signature drum pattern as a TikTok sound and watches it get remixed across fifty countries is not just generating buzz. They are building a catalog of influence. That influence has licensing value. It has sync value. It has collaboration value.
Understanding how to turn TikTok momentum into contractual leverage is the new skill set.
It is not enough to go viral. The infrastructure around the moment is what determines who benefits from it.
The Risk of Ignoring the Shift
If A&R remains instinct-only in African markets while global players rely on analytics, the outcome is predictable.
Africa continues to export talent.
But not necessarily ownership or leverage.
Artists may gain global fame. Yet catalog control, publishing rights, and distribution power may consolidate elsewhere.
The shift to data-driven decision making is not about replacing creativity.
It is about protecting value.
The Opportunity Window
The good news is this shift is still early enough to shape.
Africa’s music ecosystem is young and digitally native. Mobile streaming continues to grow. Audience behavior data already exists in massive volumes. And African music already has a proven ability to generate the kind of organic TikTok traction that labels spend millions trying to manufacture.
That is not a small advantage.
What is still developing is structured data literacy across:
Artist management
Independent labels
Creative investors
Music business education
The next generation of African music executives will need to read analytics as fluently as they read talent. They will need to understand not just that a song went viral on TikTok, but what the adoption curve looked like, where geographically it moved, which demographics drove it, and what that pattern implies for the commercial decisions that follow.
Because instinct finds the spark.
Data scales it.
This Is Not the Death of Taste
A&R is not disappearing.
Human taste still matters. Cultural understanding still matters. Storytelling still matters.
But instinct without information is fragile.
In today’s music economy, the audition room is no longer just a studio or a live show.
It is a dashboard.
And a TikTok For You page.
And a streaming analytics report.
The stakeholders who understand that shift earliest will not just discover talent.
They will structure power.
Data is the new A&R.
Africa is just beginning to treat it that way.
A guest post by
A curious mind exploring the crossroads of creativity and insight.