Rema Biography: Age, Real Name, Net Worth 2026, “Calm Down” Billion Streams, HEIS Grammy Nomination, and the Full Story of Benin City’s Global Superstar

In 2019, a nineteen-year-old from Benin City posted a freestyle video on the internet. He was wearing a white vest. The freestyle was called “Iron Man.” Don Jazzy saw it, contacted him, and signed him to Mavin Records within days. That same year, the track “Iron Man” appeared on Barack Obama’s summer playlist — placing a teenage boy from Edo State in the same cultural conversation as the former President of the United States before most of the Nigerian music industry had worked out what to make of him.

By 2022, he had released “Calm Down” — a song that started as a solo track, acquired a remix with Selena Gomez, peaked at number three on the Billboard Hot 100, became the first Afrobeats song to reach one billion streams on Spotify, became the first Afrobeats song to earn over one billion on-demand streams in the United States, led the US Afrobeats Songs chart for a record 58 consecutive weeks, and is widely regarded as the greatest Afrobeats song ever commercially recorded. The IFPI ranked its remix the second best-selling global single of 2023. Its music video hit one billion YouTube views in November 2024.

He is Divine Ikubor. The world knows him as Rema. He is 26 years old. He has a Grammy nomination. He has sold out the O2 Arena in London. He invented a genre — Afrorave — that has influenced every subsequent generation of Nigerian artists. He lost his father at eight and his brother at fifteen. He has been the youngest and perhaps the fastest-rising artist in the history of Nigerian music’s global expansion. And he is only just beginning. This is his full biography.

Rema Biography Facts at a Glance

Early Life: Benin City, Loss and a Gospel Choir That Started Everything

Divine Joshua Ikubor was born on May 1, 2000, in Benin City — the capital of Edo State, in Nigeria’s South-South geopolitical zone. Benin City is one of Nigeria’s oldest and most historically significant cities — home of the ancient Benin Kingdom, whose bronze sculptures are among the most celebrated works of pre-colonial African art — and its cultural self-confidence, its pride in its own distinct identity, and its awareness of belonging to a tradition of extraordinary human achievement run through Rema’s artistic identity as a consistent undercurrent.

He grew up in a Christian household of modest means, where his mother — Mrs Ikubor — worked as a wholesale trader to support the family. His father, Justice Ikubor, passed away in 2008 when Rema was just eight years old — the first of two devastating losses that would shape his emotional development and his musical intensity. Seven years later, in 2015, his elder brother — a figure of close personal significance — also died. (cite index=”42-1″>These tragedies compelled Rema to mature quickly and shoulder the responsibility of supporting his family. (cite index=”42-1″>At one point, he worked in Ghana to save money to support his family, demonstrating his resilience and determination.

Music entered his life — as it enters the lives of so many Nigerian artists — through the church. From a young age, he sang in his church choir, developing the vocal control and performance confidence that would later make his concerts among the most compelling in contemporary Afrobeats. (cite index=”44-1″>In a 2024 interview reported by Channels Television, he said, “It started from the church.” Beyond the church, he absorbed hip-hop, R&B, and global pop through relatives, friends, and the music he encountered growing up in a city with a strong informal music culture.

His formal education was at the Ighile Group of Schools in Edo State — where he completed both primary and secondary school. During his secondary school years, he began rapping and singing under the stage name “Blitz.” By the age of fourteen, he had adopted the name “Rema” — a simplified form of his surname — as a permanent professional identity. He formed a music duo with a friend called Alpha P, known as RNA, gaining local performance experience and developing his craft before embarking on the solo career that would change his life.

In January 2022, he enrolled at the University of Lagos — not as an interruption to his career but as a fulfilment of his mother’s wish that he complete a university education. The enrolment — by a man who was already one of Nigeria’s most commercially successful musicians — was a gesture of filial love as much as an educational decision.

The Discovery: A Freestyle Video, Don Jazzy, and the Fastest Signing in Mavin History

Rema’s professional music career began in what is, by any measure, one of the most dramatically efficient origin stories in Nigerian music history. In early 2019, he posted a freestyle rap video on social media — a raw, unpolished performance that nevertheless contained enough of what he would become to arrest the attention of anyone who understood what they were hearing.

One of the people who understood what they were hearing was Don Jazzy — the founder and CEO of Mavin Records, with two decades of talent identification behind him and the most consistent track record of any A&R figure in Nigerian music. Don Jazzy saw the video, contacted Rema, and within days had signed him to Jonzing World — a Mavin Records subsidiary label run by Don Jazzy’s brother D’Prince.

The speed of the signing was not impulsive but diagnostic. Don Jazzy had heard something in that freestyle that met every criterion his twenty years of talent identification had developed: the voice, unusual in its softness and elasticity; the melodic instinct, capable of creating hooks without trying; the cultural specificity, rooted in Benin City and Edo State in a way that was simultaneously local and universally translatable; and the personality, which radiated a confident distinctiveness that no amount of industry experience can manufacture in someone who does not already have it.

Three months after signing, Rema released his debut EP — Rema (March 2019) — which topped Apple Music Nigeria immediately upon release. The EP’s standout track, “Dumebi,” generated over 84 million YouTube views and introduced his voice to Nigeria and the Nigerian diaspora with the impact of something genuinely new. His track “Iron Man” from the same EP was included on Barack Obama’s 2019 Summer Playlist — a co-sign from the former US President that announced Rema’s name to an international audience that would not otherwise have encountered his music for years.

Afrorave: Inventing a Genre at Nineteen

From the beginning of his career, Rema resisted comfortable categorisation within existing Afrobeats conventions. His sound drew on a wider range of influences than most Nigerian pop artists — incorporating Arabian and Indian musical textures, American trap rhythms, electronic production elements, and the specific sonic identity of Benin City and Edo State’s musical heritage — into a fusion that felt simultaneously fresh and deeply rooted.

In 2021, he coined the term “Afrorave” to describe what he was making — a genre label that captured the ecstatic, slightly unhinged energy of his music, its willingness to move between melodic tenderness and percussive aggression within a single track, and its fundamental orientation toward the physical experience of dancing and movement as the primary emotional register of recorded music. (cite index=”49-1″>In 2021, he coined his sound “Afrorave,” fusing Afrobeats with Arabian and Indian influences.

Afrorave has since influenced a significant cohort of younger Nigerian and African artists — becoming one of the most discussed creative developments in Afrobeats’ ongoing evolution. The fact that a twenty-one-year-old boy from Benin City created and named a genre that subsequently influenced artists across the continent and beyond is a remarkable demonstration of creative authority that most artists do not achieve in entire careers.

“Calm Down” and Selena Gomez: The Song That Rewrote History

“Calm Down” was first released as a solo Rema track on February 11, 2022 — from his debut album Rave & Roses. It was a melodically irresistible, emotionally tender Afrobeats track about pursuit and desire, inspired, as Rema told Pitchfork, by “the events that led me to finding love at the time… It started at a party where I saw a girl who stood out from other girls so I felt like shooting my shot.” The solo version was already a major Nigerian hit. Then the remix happened.

In August 2022, a remix featuring Selena Gomez — the American pop star with over 400 million Instagram followers and one of the most commercially powerful names in global pop music — was released. The remix did not merely expand “Calm Down’s” existing audience; it transported the song into an entirely different commercial stratosphere.

(cite index=”52-1″>The song peaked at number 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 and topped the publication’s Pop Airplay, Adult Pop Airplay and Radio Songs charts. (cite index=”52-1″>According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), the remix was the second best-selling global single of 2023, earning 1.89 billion subscription streams equivalents globally. (cite index=”52-1″>The song is widely regarded as the biggest and most successful Afrobeats song of all time.

The records it set are almost dizzying in their cumulative weight. (cite index=”50-1″>It earned a billion streams on Spotify alone, making Rema the first leading African act to achieve the milestone. (cite index=”53-1″>The song made history as the first Afrobeats song to earn over one billion on-demand streams in the United States. (cite index=”49-1″>The song peaked at number 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 and led the US Afrobeats Songs chart for a record 58 weeks until October 2023. (cite index=”52-1″>A music video for the remix hit the 1 billion views mark on 8 November 2024, becoming Rema’s first and Gomez’s third song to hit the milestone.

Beyond the numbers: “Calm Down” is the song that demonstrated, more compellingly than any previous Nigerian record, that Afrobeats could compete at the very top of global mainstream pop — not by adapting its sound to Western expectations but by being fully and unapologetically itself. The fact that the most successful Afrobeats song of all time is a track about a boy shooting his shot at a girl at a party in Benin City is precisely the point. You do not win globally by erasing where you come from. You win by being so specifically and beautifully yourself that the world cannot help but pay attention.

Rave & Roses: The Debut Album That Made History

Rema’s debut studio album Rave & Roses was released on March 25, 2022, through Mavin, Jonzing World, and Interscope Records. (cite index=”48-1″>It was well-received by critics and even broke into the lower reaches of the Billboard Top 200 chart. The album featured collaborations with Chris Brown on “Time N Affection” — a cross-Atlantic collaboration that demonstrated his ability to attract American R&B royalty to a project rooted in Nigerian Afrobeats. (cite index=”47-1″>He had amassed over seventy billion streams overall, earned a Billboard Hot 100 #1 hit in “Calm Down” featuring Selena Gomez and rounded out the year with a sold out stadium show at The O2 in London UK performing to over 20,000 fans.

The deluxe edition of the album, released in 2023, incorporated the Selena Gomez remix of “Calm Down” and the companion Ravage EP, extending the album’s commercial life through one of the most sustained periods of chart domination by any African artist in history.

HEIS and the Grammy Nomination

Rema’s second studio album, HEIS, was released in July 2024 through Mavin, Jonzing World, and Interscope. The album represented a deliberate artistic evolution from the melodic romanticism of Rave & Roses into something darker, more culturally assertive, and more sonically ambitious. (cite index=”45-1″>It featured the tracks “Benin Boys” with Shallipopi, “War Machine” with ODUMODUBLVCK, “Yayo,” and “Hehehe.”

(cite index=”45-1″>It reached number seven on Billboard’s World Albums chart and number two in Nigeria. It also earned the singer his first Grammy nomination for Best Global Music Album. (cite index=”50-1″>Rema joined Burna Boy, Wizkid, Davido, and Tems as the only Afrobeats acts to earn album nominations in the history of the Grammys. At 24, he’s the youngest of them. The Grammy nomination — joining the most elite company in the history of Nigerian music at age twenty-four — confirmed that the breathtaking commercial success of “Calm Down” was not a lucky outlier but the commercial expression of a genuinely world-class artistic intelligence.

In 2025, Rema released two further singles — (cite index=”48-1″>“Baby (Is It a Crime)” and “Bout U” — both hit the Top Ten in Nigeria, maintaining his commercial presence while the industry awaited the next major project.

Live Performances and the Scale of His Global Reach

Rema’s live career has kept pace with his recorded work in demonstrating the truly global scale of his commercial reach. (cite index=”47-1″>He rounded out the year with a sold out stadium show at The O2 in London UK performing to over 20,000 fans. His 2024–2025 HEIS Tour — (cite index=”49-1″>with a Madison Square Garden show that grossed $794,000 and a European tour of 28 shows across 12 countries grossing $4.5 million — confirmed that his fanbase extended far beyond the Nigerian diaspora into mainstream Western pop and R&B audiences who encountered his music through “Calm Down” and followed it back to everything else he had made.

He holds a Guinness World Record for being the first artist to achieve a Number One hit on The Official MENA (Middle East and North Africa) Charts — confirming the specific resonance of his music in Arabic and Indian-influenced musical cultures, which the Afrorave sound was always designed to reach. (cite index=”47-1″>He’s been the highest charting African artist in history on the Billboard Hot 100 and earned over one billion streams in the US — making Afrobeats history.

Personal Life: Private, Focused and Still Becoming

Rema maintains a relatively private personal life — appropriate for a twenty-six-year-old who has been under extraordinary public scrutiny since he was nineteen. He is not publicly confirmed to be in a romantic relationship as of 2026. He enrolled at the University of Lagos in January 2022 at his mother’s request — attending university while simultaneously being one of the most commercially successful musicians in the world, an unusual combination that speaks to the specific combination of discipline and love-for-family that defines his character off-stage.

His mother, Mrs Ikubor, is a central figure in his public expressions of gratitude and purpose. The losses he has endured — his father in 2008, his elder brother in 2015 — have shaped his emotional vocabulary in ways that surface consistently in interviews where he discusses his motivation and his sense of what he owes to the family that survived those losses with him.

His fanbase — known as Ravers — is one of the most passionate in Nigerian music. Their engagement with his music is not merely commercial consumption but active advocacy — they are among the most effective streaming and playlist communities of any Nigerian artist, and their organised support has contributed measurably to the historic streaming milestones that “Calm Down” and his broader catalogue have achieved.

Rema’s Net Worth in 2026

Rema’s estimated net worth in 2026 is between $10 million and $12 million USD — a figure that reflects the extraordinary commercial performance of his career to date, moderated by his relative youth and the still-developing scope of his non-music business activities.

His income streams include:

• “Calm Down” royalties: (cite index=”49-1″>The Calm Down and Selena Gomez remix alone generated $3 million plus in royalties — an ongoing income stream from one of the most-streamed songs in recorded music history
• Broader streaming catalogue: A body of work spanning multiple EPs, two albums, and numerous singles — generating consistent income across Spotify, Apple Music, Boomplay, Audiomack, and YouTube
• Live touring: (cite index=”49-1″>His 2024–2025 HEIS Tour grossed significant sums across North America and Europe, with the European leg alone generating approximately $4.5 million
• Brand endorsements: Partnerships with Pepsi (alongside Ayra Starr), and other major brands seeking to reach his young global audience
• Interscope / UMG deal: His recording contract with Interscope and the Mavin/UMG partnership give him access to global music industry infrastructure while generating advance and royalty income
• Guinness World Record holder: The associated brand value and commercial leverage of his record-holding status

Full Discography

Career Timeline

Why Rema Matters: The Boy From Benin Who Rewrote the Rules

The most important thing about Rema’s story is not the Billboard chart positions or the Spotify records or the Grammy nomination — though each of these is genuinely extraordinary. The most important thing is the speed and the authenticity: he has done all of this while still in his mid-twenties, without softening his Benin City identity or diluting his Edo cultural roots to make himself more palatable to the international markets he has conquered.

“Calm Down” is not a song that could have come from anywhere other than Nigeria. The melodic structure, the emotional register, the specific way it moves between tenderness and confidence — all of it is rooted in the cultural soil of Benin City and Afrobeats’ musical traditions. That a song this specifically African became the most commercially successful Afrobeats record in history is not a paradox. It is the point. The specific is universal when it is done with enough honesty and skill.

(cite index=”50-1″>As Rema himself has said: “I don’t follow trends — I create them.” He created Afrorave before anyone had a name for it. He reached one billion Spotify streams with a song about shooting his shot at a girl at a party. He enrolled at UNILAG while selling out the O2. He lost his father at eight, worked in Ghana at fifteen, and became a Grammy-nominated global star at twenty-four.

He is 26 years old. The catalogue he has built before his thirtieth birthday already places him among the most commercially significant Nigerian musicians of the modern era. What he does with the next decade is one of the most interesting open questions in African music. The Ravers cannot wait to find out.

Frequently Asked Questions About Rema

What is Rema’s real name?

Rema’s real name is Divine Joshua Ikubor (also rendered as Divine Ikubor in official label materials). He was born on May 1, 2000, in Benin City, Edo State, Nigeria. He is of Esan ethnic heritage from Edo State. He adopted the stage name Rema at age fourteen — derived from a simplified form of his family name Ikubor — and used the earlier stage name “Blitz” during his early secondary school rap performances.

How old is Rema?

Rema is 26 years old as of 2026. He was born on May 1, 2000, in Benin City, Edo State. He celebrated his 26th birthday on May 1, 2026. He is the youngest member of the elite group of Afrobeats artists — alongside Burna Boy, Wizkid, Davido, and Tems — to have received a Grammy Award album nomination.

How many streams does “Calm Down” have?

“Calm Down” (Rema feat. Selena Gomez) is the most-streamed Afrobeats song in history. It surpassed one billion streams on Spotify alone — making Rema the first leading African act to achieve that milestone. It earned over one billion on-demand streams in the United States — the first Afrobeats song to do so. The music video surpassed one billion YouTube views in November 2024. The IFPI ranked it the second best-selling global single of 2023 with 1.89 billion subscription stream equivalents. It led the US Afrobeats Songs chart for 58 consecutive weeks — a record. It peaked at number three on the Billboard Hot 100 and topped Pop Airplay, Adult Pop Airplay, and Radio Songs simultaneously.

What is Rema’s net worth in 2026?

Rema’s estimated net worth in 2026 is between $10 million and $12 million USD. His wealth comes from royalties from “Calm Down” (estimated $3 million+ from the remix alone), his broader streaming catalogue, the HEIS Tour (European leg grossed approximately $4.5 million; Madison Square Garden show grossed $794,000), brand endorsements including Pepsi, and his Interscope/Mavin recording contract. At 26, his wealth is expected to grow substantially as his career develops and his non-music business activities expand.

What is Afrorave?

Afrorave is the genre term Rema coined in 2021 to describe his distinctive musical style — a fusion of traditional Afrobeats with Arabian and Indian musical influences, American trap rhythms, electronic production elements, and the specific cultural textures of Benin City and Edo State. The genre is characterised by ecstatic, physically immersive production, an elastic vocal approach that moves fluidly between rapping and singing, and a willingness to incorporate musical traditions far outside the conventional Afrobeats palette. Afrorave has since influenced a significant cohort of younger Nigerian and African artists.

Was Rema’s “Iron Man” on Barack Obama’s playlist?

Yes. Rema’s track “Iron Man” — from his debut self-titled EP (March 2019) — was included on Barack Obama’s 2019 Summer Playlist, which the former US President publishes annually as a personal recommendation of music he has been listening to. The Obama co-sign came when Rema was just nineteen years old and had been signed to Mavin Records for only a few months — introducing his name and his music to an international audience of millions who would not otherwise have encountered it for years.

Did Rema get a Grammy nomination?

Yes. Rema received a Grammy nomination for Best Global Music Album at the 67th Grammy Awards (2025) for his second studio album HEIS (released July 2024). The nomination made him the youngest Afrobeats artist ever to receive a Grammy album nomination, joining Burna Boy, Wizkid, Davido, and Tems as the only Afrobeats acts to have earned album nominations in Grammy history. He did not win — but the nomination at age 24 confirmed his standing as one of the most significant artists in contemporary global music.

What label is Rema signed to?

Rema is signed to Jonzing World — a subsidiary of Mavin Records — with global distribution through Interscope Records (a Universal Music Group label). He was discovered by Don Jazzy and signed to Jonzing World in 2019 after Don Jazzy saw a freestyle video he posted online. The Mavin/Jonzing/Interscope deal gives him access to UMG’s global music industry infrastructure while maintaining his connection to the Nigerian label ecosystem that launched him.