International Music Summit (IMS) is one of the leading conferences for the electronic music industry, held annually in Ibiza. Founded by Pete Tong, it has become the defining forum where the global dance music community gathers to catalyse sustainable growth and inspire positive change from the boardroom to the dancefloor. The theme of this year's summit, Reclaim the Dancefloor, is a direct response to a pivotal moment for electronic music culture. As private investment and consolidation reshape festival landscapes, AI accelerates the creation and distribution of music, and as shifting audience behaviours and rapid digital innovation redefine how music is experienced and monetised, the summit brought together artists, industry leaders, and cultural custodians to examine what is being gained, what is being lost, and what must be protected. Across the programme, IMS explored how the values that once defined electronic music can survive scale without dilution, how digital distraction is reshaping the shared rituals of the dancefloor, and how the community can reclaim agency over its culture in an ever-evolving industry.

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This conversation, recorded live at IMS Ibiza 2026, sits at the very heart of that mission - and it is one that our host Farah Nanji knows from the inside. As Curation Manager of IMS, Farah is responsible for shaping the summit's programming: the speakers, the panels, and the ideas that define the conversation each year. That dual role, as both an artist navigating the industry and one of the central figures curating a platform that galvanizes it,  gives this episode a rare quality of leadership and candour in equal measure.

 

This conversation was curated around the question the industry has been fiercely debating since the rise: what comes next? We bring together five of the most important voices in Afro electronic music — from the original figureheads behind the growth of Afro House in Culoe De Song and MoBlack, to Cleido from Sondela representing the new generation of creative direction and promotion, Raphael Pujol as Vice President of Global Curation at Beatport, and Shanae Dennis from The Team on the agency side. Together, they take an honest temperature check of where the scene stands in 2026, and interrogate what it will take to ensure that growth serves the culture it came from.

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THE HONEST TEMPERATURE CHECK​

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The conversation opens with an honest temperature check of the scene in 2026 - and the speakers do not land in the same place. Cleido from Sondela sees a genre in healthy expansion with real investment flowing in; Raphael Pujol from Beatport points to extraordinary platform growth while flagging an uncomfortable truth: that the top of the Afro House charts is undeniably diluted.

 

Shanae Dennis from The Team strikes a more controversial note, arguing that growth has stalled, and that a weak talent pipeline is at the root of it, a view that the rest of the panel pushes back on. Culoe de Song, one of the genre's true originators, lifts the conversation beyond commercial metrics entirely: Afro House, he says, is a poster boy for humanity, a vehicle for togetherness that is much bigger than the parties and the charts.

 

And MoBlack, who has spent eleven years building the world's biggest Afro House label, grounds it all with a reminder that none of this blew up overnight. The pandemic may have accelerated it, but the foundation was laid across a decade of relentless belief.

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THE PROBLEM WITH THE CHARTS​

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The numbers tell one story. Afro House was named Splice's sound of the year after a 778% surge in downloads in 2025, becoming the second most downloaded genre on the platform. But Raphael Pujol argues those numbers come with a shadow. The same accessibility that has driven that explosion has opened the door to a growing gap between what Beatport features and what Beatport charts. Sample packs have democratised the aesthetic of Afro House to the point where almost anyone can construct the skeleton of a track - and increasingly, they do, often with little connection to the culture it comes from.

 

The consequences compound: when the wrong music dominates the charts, it reshapes the sound expectation for the genre, potentially sends the wrong artists to the top, trains fans and festival bookers alike on a diluted version of it, creates demand for the bottle-service-friendly, VIP-facing interpretation of the sound, and systematically crowds out the artists making the real thing. The genre becomes a victim of its own visibility. 

Raphael draws a direct parallel with Beatport's recent launch of Latin Electronic as a formalised genre - a structural move that created category clarity, protected cultural specificity, and gave a community of producers a home that made sense. He opens the conversation about a potential Afro Pop sub-category as a similar intervention: designed not to diminish but to protect, drawing a clear line between music born from the community and music that borrows only its surface. 

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IBIZA, OWNERSHIP, AND THE SEASON AHEAD​

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For the first time in Ibiza's history, the island holds five Afro Electronic residencies simultaneously, and it is hard to look at that number and argue the growth has stalled. Ushuaia launches its opening party with an all-star Afro lineup, a milestone MoBlack believes cannot be overstated: a venue historically defined by a very different sound choosing to open its doors with this music is not a footnote; it is a statement. But the more structural story of this Ibiza season is not about the bookings themselves - it is about who is making them. Shimza at Pacha, Black Coffee at Universe, Francis Mercier at Hi, Ameme at Cova Santa, Pablo Fierro at Teatro Peyrera, and crucially, each of them is not just hosting a residency, but they are holding the keys to who else gets in the room.

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As a leading booking agent, Shanae Dennis makes the case that the most effective advocacy was never pitching from the outside. It is ownership from within - and this season, that ownership is visible at scale across the island's biggest stages. What happens at these residencies over the coming months will reverberate well beyond Ibiza. The lineups they build, the artists they platform, and the audiences they cultivate will shape booking conversations across Europe heading into 2027 - and may yet prove to be the most compelling answer to the question of where the growth curve goes from here.

​THE VOCALIST QUESTION​

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One of the most unresolved tensions in Afro-electronic music, and across electronic music more broadly, is the status of the vocalist: heard everywhere, yet seen almost nowhere. And with AI now capable of generating culturally-inflected vocal performances on demand, their economic and creative position has never been more at threat. The panel confronts this directly. Cleido argues that the path forward for vocalists is structural: stop defining yourself by the tracks you appear on, and start building the infrastructure of a standalone artist - your own show, your own sound, and your own community of fans who come for you specifically. Without that, you will always be dependent on the producer for the chance of a live moment, and invisible the rest of the time

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But the panel also sits with a harder question: does the marginalisation of the vocalist actually threaten the genre itself? If the people carrying the cultural and emotional weight of the music, the voices that connect a dancefloor to something humanly ancestral, are structurally shut out of ownership and credit, what happens to the soul of the sound over time? And if AI can now replicate that voice on demand, cheaply and without negotiation, the ethical question becomes an existential one. MoBlack names the historical irony that underpins all of it: the vocalist was once the only artist. The producer was not even mentioned, let alone credited. Now the dynamic has inverted entirely - and the vocalist is frequently the uncredited one. Getting the balance right is not just an ethical question. It is a structural one for the long-term vitality of the genre.

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WHAT THE FUTURE HOLDS​

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The conversation closes where it began: with the scale and the stakes of what Afro electronic music actually represents. Kwaito, gqom, amapiano, Afro house, Afrotech, 3-step - these are not just genres. They represent one of the most extraordinary waves of musical innovation the world has seen, much of it emerging from South Africa over the past thirty years. And like every genre that has gone global before it, the moment of scale is also a moment of reckoning. The term Afro house has already stretched to mean everything, and in doing so, has risked meaning nothing.

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 But the culture is responding: a return to purism, original voices evolving faster than the industry can define them, and a growing conviction that the next frontier is not westward expansion but genuine value exchange with the continent that built this music. What is emerging there is extraordinary. Nigeria's club and festival infrastructure is, by some accounts, already beyond Berlin's. Kenya's scene is alive in ways most of the Western industry has not yet begun to register. The future of Afro electronic music is not consolidation in the West - it is the sound finding its way home, and the industry finally following it. The panel's parting message is clear: evolution and dilution are not the same thing, and confusing the two is one of the most dangerous mistakes the industry can make right now.

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WE ALSO UNCOVER:

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• Why launching a genre on Beatport is harder than it looks 

• Why the Middle East's exit from the touring circuit may be the unexpected catalyst that finally redirects money and attention toward the continent

• Why London remains one of the hardest places to grow Afro-electronic music

• How South African audiences' fierce loyalty to their own local artists is both the genre's greatest strength and its most underestimated cultural force

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