Tuma Basa has announced his departure from YouTube after eight years at the platform, where he most recently served as Director of Black Music & Culture.
Basa confirmed the news in an Instagram post on Thursday (April 2). “After eight great years at YouTube, I’m taking a leap of faith and stepping into my next chapter,” he wrote.
“Thank you to the Music Team at YouTube, the leadership, the artists, the managers, the labels, the producers, the continents, the city specialists, the uploaders and YouTubeLovers and even the Gen AI haters that made this run.. a great run. Murakoze Cyane, Asante Sana, Siyabonga, Amesegenalew, Gracias, Obrigado, Merci Beaucoup.”
YouTube had not commented on the departure at the time of writing. No successor has been announced.
Basa joined YouTube in June 2018 as Director of Urban Music, a role in which he was tasked with deepening the platform’s engagement with the urban music community. His title subsequently evolved to Director of Black Music & Culture.
At the time of his appointment, Lyor Cohen, YouTube’s Global Head of Music, said: “Tuma brings a deep knowledge of the Music Industry with many years of experience at BET, MTV, REVOLT and most recently, Spotify.
His experience will be invaluable to the music journey we are on at YouTube, connecting artists and fans across the globe, and I am thrilled to welcome his voice to our collective efforts.”
Basa was born in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) to a Rwandan family, grew up in Iowa after his father enrolled in a graduate studies program at the University of Iowa, and later relocated to Zimbabwe as a teenager.
He spent the early part of his executive career accumulating roles across television and digital media, including four years at BET, ten years at MTV — where he created over 2,500 hours of unique music playlists — and three years as VP of Music Programming at REVOLT TV, the hip-hop broadcaster founded by Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs.
In 2015, Basa joined Spotify as Global Programming Head of Hip-Hop, where he became closely associated with the platform’s RapCaviar playlist.
Under his stewardship, RapCaviar grew to over 9 million followers and expanded into live events in a partnership with Live Nation. He departed Spotify in early 2018, the day after the company filed to list on the New York Stock Exchange.
His exit comes at a period of strategic movement for YouTube‘s music operation. In March, Cohen published his annual letter to music industry partners, outlining the platform’s priorities around AI, visual storytelling, and artist development — and reiterating that YouTube paid out over $8 billion to the music industry between July 2024 and June 2025. YouTube also withdrew its data from the Billboard charts in January of this year, following a dispute over the weighting of ad-supported streams.
Basa has not disclosed what he plans to do next.Music Business Worldwide
