There are moments in an artist’s life when the conversation around them grows larger than any single melody, bigger than any one performance. And there are moments in a nation’s life when its art becomes a mirror—not a decoration, not a souvenir, but a surface that reflects its own face back, asking: do you still know yourself?



Ethiopian music, in this era of shifting tastes, digital marketplaces, and global currents, now stands before such a mirror. The debate surrounding it has become a reflection, posing uncomfortable questions and demanding clarity: who are we, and what are we becoming?

Through generations of artists, one question keeps returning: are we losing our sound?

This inquiry has outgrown technical debates over instrumentation or recording practices. It has become a cultural reckoning. What does it mean to make Ethiopian music today? In a world seduced by algorithms, Afrobeats, and borderless digital trends, how can a nation preserve the soul woven into its scales?

The conversation threads through time: slipping along vinyl grooves, cassette spools, CD jackets, and now streaming links. It echoes in studios where young producers stare at laptops glowing into the night and in rehearsal rooms where older musicians tighten the strings of instruments that have existed longer than many nations.

Recently, in a conversation with The Reporter, two of the country’s respected musical voices—composer, arranger, and pianist Dawit Yifru, and Musikawi CEO and producer Samuel Mulugeta—shared their reflections. Speaking from different vantage points, they sketch a portrait of a music scene caught between forgetting and rediscovering itself.

Though their creative paths differ, both illuminate the same truth: Ethiopia’s musical identity is under pressure—not from outside forces, but from within. Both insist the world wants something from Ethiopia that Ethiopia itself is in danger of abandoning.

When Dawit speaks of Ethiopian music, it is with quiet urgency and the calm authority of someone who has spent a lifetime listening—not just with his ears, but with memory. He is unsettled, perhaps even wounded, by a growing notion within the industry: that relevance means sounding like Afrobeats, Afro-pop, American pop, or whatever commercial current sweeps global playlists. To him, this idea is tragically backward.

“We have our own sound,” he insists. “A sound shaped by the tizita scale, unique to our culture; by rhythms older than many modern states; by melodies woven into childhood rituals. These are not relics—they are living DNA of the nation.”

Yet, he notes, young musicians sometimes believe the opposite—that modernity comes from looking outward.

“People assume modernity means progress,” he says. “And inside that assumption lies a painful irony: in trying to sound more global, Ethiopian music risks erasing the very identity the world is seeking.”

Dawit’s observation is simple, yet astonishing: in Europe and America, more than a dozen foreign bands today perform Ethiopian music—painstakingly studying its vocal styles, scales, and rhythms. Not as experiments, but as committed artistic identities.

“They have exhausted everything they had at home,” he says. “Now they’re coming to us.”

He recalls traveling recently to Finland and Sweden, where he participated in WOMAX, a global platform celebrated for presenting music rooted deeply in heritage. Nothing he witnessed there attempted to “modernize” the performances; not a single act arrived armed with watered-down pop or diluted jazz. They came with their cultural cores intact.

And world audiences, he notes, gravitate toward exactly that authenticity. The tragedy, in his view, is not global indifference, but Ethiopian indifference.

“We are abandoning what we have and running toward their style. To me, that is a major downfall.”

Ethiopia’s musical DNA—from the tessellating patterns of the kebero to the haunting tension of the tizita—is far richer and more original than the mass-produced genres sweeping the globe. Yet the industry, caught in a spiral of self-doubt, often assumes that copying what’s popular will make it more visible.

Dawit does not dismiss fusion outright. A touch of jazz here, a brush of blues there, “these are spices, not foundations,” he says. The foundation, he insists, must remain Ethiopian.

Because when the root is lost, the music becomes unmoored—“cheap,” “ordinary,” “unremarkable,” in his words. Not because the traditions lack complexity, but because the artists producing them are no longer shaped by the cultural immersion needed to deliver their depth.

For Dawit, nothing embodies Ethiopia’s sonic identity more than the tizita scale—a scale found nowhere else in the world.

It is memory in musical form, childhood in harmonic shape. It lives in weddings, holidays, lullabies, gatherings, grief, and joy. To lose it, he believes, is to lose something fundamental about being Ethiopian.

“Even internationally, people now ask, ‘What is your music? How does it sound?’” he says. Curiosity is growing because the sound is unique—but that uniqueness only exists if Ethiopia continues to carry it.

The danger, he warns, is that artists who never grew up immersed in traditional sounds cannot interpret them authentically. They dilute them, not out of disrespect, but because the music was never internalized—it has not shaped them since childhood. The cultural wiring is missing.

“As the saying goes,” he adds, “we don’t recognize the gold in our hands.”

Dawit highlights the young musician Addis Alemayehu, whose mastery of the masinqo has astonished European performers attempting to replicate pieces from decades ago. They try hard to copy him—a testament not to exoticism, but to craftsmanship cultivated over generations.

Yet Ethiopians often see their own traditions as basic, too familiar to be special. But Dawit believes that music created with cultural intention, “even if not celebrated today, becomes tomorrow’s archive, tomorrow’s history.”

“If we craft our music with intention,” he says, “it will stand.”

If Dawit stakes his claim firmly, Samuel offers a perspective that does not contradict it, but widens the lens.

To Samuel, the idea of “abandoning originality” is often misunderstood. Ethiopian music has always absorbed influences. The beloved classics—Alemayehu Eshete’s electrifying swagger, the vintage horns that defined the seventies—did not arise in isolation. He says they borrowed from Motown, from funk, from Elvis, from The Beatles.

But they borrowed with intention, not imitation. “The difference,” Samuel insists, “is that even when they borrowed, they integrated their own elements. They never adopted things blindly.”

That, he argues, is why those records still resonate across generations: they are both rooted and adventurous.

Samuel believes fusion is not a betrayal of Ethiopian identity, but its lifeline—“only when the foundation remains Ethiopian.”

For him, Ambasel, Bati, Tizita: these scales are not fragile relics. They are flexible frameworks. You can build techno on top of them, dance music, hip-hop, Ama-piano, electronic house. They bend without breaking.

If anything, fusion done well accelerates global acceptance. He cites Mulatu Astatke, whose Ethio-jazz succeeded not because it imitated Western jazz, but because its backbone remained Ethiopian.

“Mulatu used European elements,” Samuel says, “but built the foundation on Ethiopian scales and playing styles.”

In Samuel’s view, the younger generation—including major contemporary figures—is more aware of this than outsiders might assume. They sample tuba-like field horns, market rhythms, countryside flute lines—not for nostalgia, but to anchor new forms of modern electronic expression.

Influence, he argues, is not unidirectional. Ethiopian rhythms inspire foreign producers today, just as Ethiopia absorbs global soundscapes. To him, this is not decay—it is evolution.

Dawit worries about identity; Samuel worries about balance. Both acknowledge a shared reality: the musical ecosystem itself has irreversibly changed.

Albums used to have long lives. They grew slowly, breathed slowly, waited patiently for recognition. A record could sleep for decades, only to awaken when a new generation heard it as if for the first time.

Today, Samuel says, the digital world has rewritten the rules. Music no longer waits—it is pushed. An algorithm recommends a song, and the listener follows. When the algorithm stops, listening stops. The lifespan of a piece is now determined not solely by cultural resonance, but by digital visibility.

“Hundreds of thousands of songs are released every day,” he says. “Competition is extremely fierce.”

Some albums vanish in a week, not for lack of artistry, but because algorithms offer no protection. Others survive through human spaces: clubs, live shows, neighborhoods, DJs in places where music breathes without being reduced to data. Samuel believes these may be the last guardians of longevity.

He recognizes that not every listener immediately grasps the complexity or ambition of a new album. Sometimes, time is the translator. A record rejected today may become a masterpiece tomorrow, once the audience has grown into it. But this requires what the digital world struggles to provide: space for music to breathe.

At the heart of Samuel’s reflections lies one critical question: Who ensures that Ethiopian elements remain intact—not as decoration, but as artistic vision?

In Ethiopia, the producer is often the artist themselves. They choose the lyrics, the arrangements, the sonic direction. This concentration of power can be liberating—but also burdensome.

Samuel believes someone must intentionally protect the Ethiopian backbone of the work. Is it the arranger? The instrumentalist? The lyricist? The poet shaping the melodic motif?

For him, the answer is the producer—not as financier, but as artistic architect. A producer with a clear vision unites all elements, holds the melodic identity in place, and ensures the final product does not drift into imitation.

In older Ethiopian studios, such figures existed. They curated lyrics, selected arrangements, shaped artistic direction. They functioned as cultural gatekeepers. Today, as digital independence grows, that role has weakened—and must be reclaimed if Ethiopian music is to preserve its identity while evolving.

Both Dawit and Samuel, despite their differing paths, converge on one truth: Ethiopian music is not in danger because it is evolving. It is in danger if that evolution loses its anchor.

Dawit fears cultural abandonment. Samuel fears careless fusion. Both fear imitation without understanding. Yet they also see hope. Foreign musicians embrace Ethiopian styles with reverence. Young Ethiopian producers sample ancestral sounds intentionally. Traditional performers astonish global audiences with instruments once dismissed as “ordinary.”

The world is listening—often more carefully than Ethiopians themselves. The question, then, is not whether Ethiopian music will travel internationally. It already has. The question is: what version of Ethiopia will the world hear?