Burna Boy has been sitting pretty at the top of NotJustOk’s Afrobeats Power Ranking for a while, but Ayra Starr just walked in and took his spot.
The Mavin Records singer claimed the No. 1 position for August 2026, becoming only the fourth female artist to ever reach the summit since the ranking launched.
What pushed her there was the release of her third studio album, Starrgirl, which dropped on August 14, 2026.
The project made serious noise across streaming platforms, and the momentum behind it was enough to shift the entire ranking in her favor.
The biggest engine behind that streaming surge was Heaven Baby, her collaboration with ZAYN. The track peaked at over 937,000 daily streams on Spotify and debuted at No. 1 on the UK Official British Asian Music Chart, which is a crossover move not many Afrobeats acts have pulled off so cleanly.
It is worth putting her name in context here. Ayra Starr already had two Grammy nominations heading into this moment, both from the 2024 Grammy Awards, including a Best New Artist nod.
That kind of recognition does not come around often for artists at her stage, and Starrgirl feels like the album that was always supposed to follow that wave.
She joins a short but sharp list of women who have reached No. 1 on the ranking. South African singer Tyla was the first, topping the chart in February 2025 and then returning to the No. 1 spot in December 2025.
Ghanaian-American singer Moliy followed in July 2025, and Tems has done it twice, in September 2025 and February 2026.
That Tems has topped the ranking twice is telling. It shows the ceiling for female artists in this space is not fixed, and the conversation around dominance in Afrobeats is shifting in real time. Ayra Starr reaching No. 1 in her first appearance at the top adds another data point to that shift.
What makes this particular moment interesting is the ZAYN angle. Pulling a former One Direction member into an Afrobeats project and landing a UK chart No. 1 off the back of it is a reminder that the genre’s global reach is still expanding. It also puts Ayra Starr in a different conversation than most of her peers, one that stretches well beyond Lagos or London.
Starrgirl has only been out since mid-August, so the streaming numbers are still building. The ranking for September 2026 has not dropped yet, and there is a real question about whether she can hold the position or whether the usual suspects will reclaim the top.
