On the 12th of November 2025, Burna Boy kicked off his latest tour of the U.S.A riding high on a wave of accolades and achievements, the first African Artist to accumulate five Grammy album award nominations, the first African Artist to sellout a U.S venue, solidifying his reputation as one of the most recognised Afrobeats mega stars on the planet at the moment.
His 8th studio album “No Sign Of Weakness” released on the 25th July featured collaborations with big name artists such as Travis Scott, Stromae, Shaboozey and even Mick Jagger.
Controversy
So as they say what could go wrong? for a man obviously at the peak of his career.
Unfortunately, where there is fame and fortune, pride and self-destruction are often not far behind. The controversy for Burna Boy started after he ejected a female fan from his concert in Colorado for the alleged sin of daring to fall asleep during the show. This led to a backlash on Social Media with tickets sales plummeting after widespread calls for fans especially females to boycott his shows. Burna Boy seemed to have made the matter worse by issuing a late half-hearted apology to the lady probably after realising that his ticket sales were falling.
Since then there have been videos circulating online showing Burna Boy performing to a half empty concert venue in Houston Texas, which must have been a disaster for him, considering the fact that Houston Texas is known to have a high population of his fellow Nigerians as well as other Africans. There has also been news that he had to cancel his concert scheduled for the 28th of November in Minneapolis due to low ticket sales.
So what are the takeaways from this – My view would be that Burna Boy obviously needs to improve on his customer care and public relation skills, I for one believe that Burna should have immediately issued an apology and a full refund to the lady in question. There is no doubt that he is a hugely talented Artiste, but no matter how big or famous an Artiste might be, he is still nothing without his fans. Especially females if you are a young male artist. We all know that the U.S market has always been a hard nut to crack, and it can also quite unforgiving and very quick to consign Artists to oblivion if they stumble and make too many mistakes. Just ask Janet Jackson who never seemed to have never recovered from that Super Bowl fiasco back in 2004 or Vanilla Ice who went from hero to zero faster than you could melt an ice cream cone in the Sahara.
Will Burna Boy weather the storm and recover from the dent in his popularity – I think he probably will mainly because he is one of the most talented Afrobeats artists on the planet at the moment and he has a huge followings in Africa, the UK -Europe etc so he is not solely reliant on the US market, however he needs to learn lessons from this incident and not take his audience for granted -Artistes rise and fall all the time – I would suggest he takes particular note of the experience of his fellow Nigerian star Naira Marley who seems to have permanently fallen from fame after undergoing his own controversy due to the death of his label artiste -Mohbad in 2023.
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