Journal of African Cultural Studies

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Mobilising African music: how mobile

telecommunications and technology firms are
transforming African music sectors

Christiaan De Beukelaer & Andrew J. Eisenberg

To cite this article: Christiaan De Beukelaer & Andrew J. Eisenberg (2020) Mobilising
African music: how mobile telecommunications and technology firms are transforming
African music sectors, Journal of African Cultural Studies, 32:2, 195-211, DOI:
10.1080/13696815.2018.1546569

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2018.1546569

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JOURNAL OF AFRICAN CULTURAL STUDIES
2020, VOL. 32, NO. 2, 195–211
https://doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2018.1546569

Mobilising African music: how mobile telecommunications

and technology firms are transforming African music sectors
a b
Christiaan De Beukelaer and Andrew J. Eisenberg
a
School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia; bDivision of Arts and
Humanities, New York University Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This paper explores the role of mobile telecommunication and Music industry; music
technology firms (MTTs) in the distribution of recorded music in distribution; piracy; mobile
Ghana and Kenya. These countries both have vibrant music phones; telecoms; m-
markets with weak formal distribution networks. Limited commerce; Ghana; Kenya
enforcement of copyright regimes and weak market regulation
created new entrepreneurial business models. While ‘big tech’
dominates this space elsewhere, in African contexts the main
players are mobile service providers (e.g. MTN, Vodafone, Tigo)
and digital content firms (e.g. Liberty Afrika, MTech, Cellulant).
These transnational players cater to fast-growing consumer
markets that do not have easy access to major music distribution
platforms such as iTunes and Spotify (which tend to provide very
limited access to ‘local’ content, in any case). Despite their
particular and increasingly significant roles, very little empirical
attention has been paid to the activities of mobile
telecommunication and technology firms (MTTs) in music sectors.
This paper takes stock of why and how MTTs have entered into
the business of recorded music distribution in Ghana and Kenya,
and assesses the ramifications of their entry for the music sectors
in these and other African countries as part of broader global
shifts in the production, distribution and marketing of recorded
music.

Introduction
In 2012, a young Nigerian man named Ikechukwu Anoke emerged as a new powerbroker
in Kenyan popular music. Having helped to launch hitmaking pop group Camp Mulla, he
was busy signing management contracts with some of the country’s top artists. Given the
success of Nigerian popular music in the second decade of the twenty-first century, it is
not surprising that a Nigerian would emerge as an influential figure in Kenyan music at
this moment. What is surprising, however, is that this Nigerian would have arrived in
Kenya with little to no prior experience in music production or promotion. Anoke had
moved to Kenya to head up the East African subsidiary of a Nigerian mobile technology
firm. This, it turned out, was enough to place him at the centre of the Kenyan music sector.

CONTACT Christiaan De Beukelaer [email protected] School of Culture and Communi-

cation, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed https://doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2018.1546569.
© 2018 International African Institute
196 C. DE BEUKELAER AND A. J. EISENBERG

Anoke’s transition from mobile telecommunications executive to music mogul is one of

many stories that speak to a large-scale transformation in African ‘musical capitalism’ (Born
2013, 51). This article explores the institutional backdrop against which these stories are
playing out. Over the past decade, the business of music in Africa has become increasingly
bound up with mobile telecommunications. As music sectors in western (and some Asian)
countries are being reshaped by the rising influence of decentralised networks and online
systems dominated by GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon), African music
sectors are experiencing a different, but no less disruptive and transformative, moment
of ‘transectorial innovation’ (Jenkins 2008; Morris 2015; Théberge 1997), due to the
entrance of local and international mobile telecommunications and technology firms
(MTTs). In this article, we explore how African music sectors have become entangled
with what we refer to as MTT sectors. We draw our data from Ghana and Kenya, for the
practical reason that each of us has undertaken extended research on the economics of
music in one of these countries (Christiaan de Beukelaer in Ghana, Andrew J. Eisenberg
in Kenya). The striking similarities that emerged in our informal conversations about our
respective research prompted us to undertake the more thoroughgoing and diagnostic
exploration of the role of MTTs in African music sectors that we present in this paper.
The terms music sector and MTT sector are by no means transparent; however, we refrain
from defining them a priori, as our aim is precisely to develop an understanding of African
music and MTT sectors through an analysis of their transectorial interactions. These inter-
actions, we suggest, are increasingly integral to each of them. Our approach in this respect
is broadly ‘relational’. In Latour’s language, we ‘assemble’, rather than assume, totalities by
tracing the relations and mediations that comprise them (Latour 2005). But it grows less
from an engagement with theoretical works of the ‘relational turn’ than from a methodo-
logical focus on the stories of the individual and collective actors who navigate and
remake institutional structures. We locate our work within the emerging field of ‘economic
ethnomusicology’, which employs ethnographic and other qualitative methods to explore
the economic relations in and around musical practice (Morcom and Neveling 2015;
Perullo 2011; Taylor 2012, 2015). In particular, we draw inspiration from Perullo’s (2011)
approach of piecing together the various institutions and practices of a ‘music
economy’ (as he calls it) by describing the ‘creative practices’ that serve to enact them.
Our work here is only ethnographic in a limited sense, however. We make use of data
from ethnographic fieldwork; but since our aim to map the new institutional terrain
that has emerged from the intersection of music and mobile telephony in Africa, our analy-
sis remains above the ground level where the ethnographic rubber meets the road. We
leave it to future work, by ourselves and others, to engage more closely with the experi-
ences and perspectives of the actors that animate this new terrain.
In addition to economic ethnomusicology, we draw perspectives from the literature on
music, media, and cultural industries (Hesmondhalgh 2013; Meier 2016; Morris 2015;
Sterne 2012). The natural point of articulation for these literatures is the ‘digital music com-
modity’, which Morris (2015) defines as ‘a particular combination of data and sound that
exists as an entity in and of itself for sale or acquisition in online outlets via computers or
other digital portable devices’ (2015, 2). The paradigmatic form(at) of digital music
commodity is the MP3, understood as a contained and transportable music file
encoded with the MPEG Layer 3 compression algorithm (Sterne 2012).1 But we introduce
other forms here, as well – in particular, the ringback tone – whose import in African
 JOURNAL OF AFRICAN CULTURAL STUDIES 197

contexts suggests that the MP3 does not have the same global dominance it once did
(Sterne 2012, 198).
Morris (2015) stresses the novel socio-material relations that prevail in the digital music
commodity, and how they have transformed the ways in which music is commodified and
experienced. ‘Rather than a dematerialisation’, he argues, ‘digital music is a rematerialized
commodity, one whose materials bring new sources of value for listeners, companies, and
music itself’ (Morris 2015, 14 emphasis in original). The shift from tangible objects as music
carriers to largely intangible ‘files’ in the digital context has not removed, but rather ‘re-
tuned’ the music commodity’s previously defining physical manifestation into a more
mobile and versatile digital formal that still relies on an ecology of playback devices
and other tangible infrastructures. We draw on Morris’s insight to begin to think about
what appears to be a revolution in musical capitalism in Africa and other parts of the
Global South – notably India (Beaster-Jones 2014), South Korea (Lee 2012), and Bolivia
(Stobart 2010) – whereby the ways music is exchanged and experienced are shaped by
digital music commodities that constitute and are constituted by the convergence of
music and mobile telecommunications.
We proceed by mapping what we call the dynamic alignments of the music and MTT
sectors in Ghana and Kenya, by which we mean the sometimes fleeting, sometimes
lasting situations in which the two sectors come to share a set of institutional structures
and strategies. Our analysis reveals a number of ways in which African music sectors
have been transformed by these dynamic alignments. At the same time, it suggests
that the convergence of the music and MTT sectors in African countries has perpetuated,
rather than challenged, the political economy of music. Whether controlled by major
record labels or MTT firms, it seems, African music sectors retain their oligonomic character:
intermediaries (labels, distributors, promoters, media outlets, etc.) still act as an oligopoly
(‘when a few sellers control a particular market’) towards audiences and an oligopsony (‘a
market in which there are many sellers, but few buyers’) towards musicians (Bishop 2005,
445), tempering the potential for music creators to act on existing power structures.
The remainder of this article is organised in four sections. The first two offer preliminary
discussions of the music and MTT sectors. We then explore how the convergence of these
sectors manifests. Finally, before concluding, we discuss how economic value is extracted
from music in this new context and by whom.

Music
When we speak of African music sectors, we mean spaces of economic activity oriented
around creating value from music genres that primarily fall within the realm of ‘popular
music’. In Ghana, Kenya, and a number of other African countries, this realm expanded
at the turn of the millennium, as media liberalisation ‘created a new space, first for
access to foreign music then for new local music’ (Eisenberg Forthcoming; Grätz 2013;
Shipley 2012, 13). New genres burst on the scene, and now exist alongside older genres
(e.g. highlife in Ghana and benga in Kenya) as well as genres that combine elements of
old and new (e.g. hiplife in Ghana and neo-benga in Kenya). For the most part, we do
not deal with the aesthetic formations – the styles and genres – that inhere in African
music sectors. Though we engage in dialogue with scholarship that brings musicological
perspectives into the analysis of music sectors (Eisenberg Forthcoming; Perullo 2011;
198 C. DE BEUKELAER AND A. J. EISENBERG

Shipley 2013), we bracket the aesthetic here in order to focus more tightly on institutional
dynamics.
African music sectors are extraordinarily diverse. While some key characteristics (high
risk, olignomic structure, non-rivalrous [digital] goods, etc.) are broadly shared among
them, the local ‘path-dependency’ of production, distribution, and consumption of
music has spawned a wide variety of configurations of key players and business models
(De Beukelaer 2015). Analysing African music sectors thus necessitates a grounded
approach that attends to transactions and regimes of value that do not easily align with
a. priori conceptions of how the sector is (or should be) organised.
As mentioned above, we draw inspiration from Perullo’s (2011) emphasis on multifar-
ious ‘creative practices’ in his study of the Tanzanian ‘music economy’. Perullo explains
that he developed his approach in response to the obvious shortcomings of analyses
that assume African music sectors to be merely underdeveloped versions of Western
music sectors and therefore seek ‘to understand the way music is being produced, sold,
and purchased [by looking] for record companies, performing rights organizations, and
large numbers of albums sold’ (Perullo 2011, xv). Such factors, Perullo’s work demon-
strates, may well be absent or barely present in an otherwise dynamic African music
sector (see also De Beukelaer and Spence 2019). Where we depart from Perullo is in our
decision not to adopt his key term ‘music economy’, which makes an awkward fit with
another term we find extremely helpful: ‘transectoriality’. In part, this is a purely ‘editorial’
decision, designed to enhance the clarity of our prose (transectoriality, after all, refers to
‘sectors’, not ‘economies’). But we also suggest that the totalising connotation of
‘economy’ may lead us away from essential questions of musical capitalism in Africa
that the concept of transectoriality opens up, such as questions about local African
responses to the processes of media ‘convergence’ (Jenkins 2008) that have been
spurred by the advent of the ‘digital music commodity’ (Morris 2015).
To the extent that African music sectors resemble one another, it is largely because
they share a set of challenges that negatively affect the ability of music creators to gener-
ate revenue from their creations. These include, primarily, weak networks of recorded
music distribution, due to a combination of the slow adoption of digital distribution
methods by incumbents and the disruptive effects of digital innovations – effects that
are exacerbated by the agility of unauthorised distributors or ‘pirates’ (De Beukelaer
2015; Eckstein and Schwarz 2014; Röschenthaler and Diawara 2016) – and a lack of
effectiveness and transparency among collective management organisations (CMOs),
which has meant that airplay (often secured through payola) does not necessarily result
in royalties payments or album sales (Perullo and Eisenberg 2014; Street, Laing, and
Schroff 2016).
These challenges collude to situate three broad sets of activities at the centre of most, if
not all, African music sectors: live performance, music recording, and celebrity marketing.
The last of these comprises activities through which creative music workers extract value
from artists’ fame through endorsement deals, brand marketing and ‘ambassadorship’,
and product or service ‘launches’ (Pier 2015; Shipley 2013). These sets of activities sit in
a tight, mutually reinforcing relationship: poor returns on recorded music lead to a
greater emphasis in live performance and celebrity marketing, both of which provide
new reasons for remaining in the business of being a ‘recording artist’ (De Beukelaer
2016; Holt 2010; Skinner 2014). Our analysis of the activities of MTTs in the music
 JOURNAL OF AFRICAN CULTURAL STUDIES 199

sectors of Kenya and Ghana homes in on this triad of live performance, music recording,
and celebrity marketing.

MTTs
African Mobile Telecommunications and Technology Sectors (MTTs) comprise three types
of organisations: 1) mobile service providers (also commonly referred to as ‘mobile
network providers’, ‘mobile service operators’ or ‘mobile telecoms’), 2) digital content
firms (including digital content intermediaries, variably known as ‘premium rate service
providers’ or ‘content service providers’, as well as operators of platforms for mobile
music sales and services), and 3) mobile hardware manufacturers. Our aim in this
section is to sketch the diversity of these actors and their activities in Ghana and Kenya,
with special attention to how the activities orient the actors toward local music sectors.

Mobile service providers

The sheer reach of mobile telecommunications in Ghana and Kenya is one of the primary
conditions for the convergence of the music and MTT sectors in these countries. As detailed
in Supplement 1, mobile service providers connect vast swaths of the populations of Ghana
and Kenya, and internet use has ballooned in these countries within the past decade as a
result.2 Given the weakness of the distribution networks for recorded music, this situation
represents an obvious opportunity for music creators. Bob Collymore, CEO of Kenya’s
largest mobile service provider Safaricom, put the matter plainly, if condescendingly, in a
2011 interview: ‘Importantly for these kids [young music artists], not only do we provide
a platform, we provide money for them so they can sell. We provide a platform with
18 million, 17 million customers, so they can sell their music’ (BalancingActAfrica 2011).
Meanwhile, the competitive environment for mobile voice and text communication has
driven mobile service providers to embrace the sale of data and so-called ‘value added
services’, both of which create openings for dynamic alignments of the music and MTT
sectors, as detailed below. Data use, both in terms of number of subscribers and the
amount of data consumed, forms a primary growth segment for mobile service providers,
resulting in vast markets for telecom operators that sell data bundles (ranging on average
from 100 megabytes to 5 gigabytes). Remaining potential for further market penetration in
this area promises to drive further competition and innovation (see Supplement 1, Tables 4
and 5). Value added services form a less significant growth segment for mobile service pro-
viders, with the notable exception of mobile money transfer solutions such as Safaricom’s
M-Pesa system, which sees billions of dollars in transfers every quarter (see Supplement 1,
Table 6).
The advent of mobile money not only enables telecoms to play a leading role in digital
transactions. It also transforms the mobile phone into a common tool for everyday com-
merce. This holds great significance for the marketing of recorded music via mobile net-
works, and is likely part of the reason for the remarkable dynamism of commercial music
distribution via mobile telecommunications networks, or music m-commerce, in Kenya
(Eisenberg 2012). Data on mobile money in Ghana are not easily available, but it is clear
these systems have seen slower uptake there than in Kenya; and the same comparison
can be made with respect to music m-commerce in the two countries.
200 C. DE BEUKELAER AND A. J. EISENBERG

There are four common forms of music m-commerce, in Africa and globally, each built
around the sale or, more commonly, rental of one of four types of digital music commod-
ity: the ringtone, the ringback tone, the music download, and the music stream (see Table
1; cf. Lee 2012, 249). Within MTT sectors, and in the experience of mobile phone users,
each form is generally conceived of as a ‘service’ in which music is ‘delivered’ (rather
than ‘sold’) in a particular format. As such, music m-commerce benefits mobile service pro-
viders by increasing data use, while also generating revenue for multiple parties through
the sale of music ‘content’. It also has the added potential benefit of bolstering brand
loyalty – which is no small matter in a context in which client base growth is slowing
and profit margins are decreasing.
Mobile service providers in Ghana and Kenya have not been quiet about their expand-
ing role in local music distribution. On the contrary, they have worked to position them-
selves as patrons of local music sectors, by sponsoring music awards shows and music
industry expos. Such activities, which we categorise as industry patronage (see below),
are essentially special forms of brand marketing that also have as their aim the develop-
ment of the local music ‘content’ industries that feed the growth in m-commerce.

Digital content firms

Music m-commerce has opened a space for new forms of intermediation that have been
taken up by an array of new and previously existing firms. These digital content firms fall
into two types, digital content intermediaries and third-party m-commerce platforms. The
former license music ‘content’ and aggregate it for mobile service providers. In many
cases, a digital content intermediary also – perhaps even primarily – operates in other
areas outside of music, offering ‘digital solutions’ to large corporations (including, but
not limited to, mobile service providers). For example, Cellulant, a major Kenyan digital
content intermediary that has recently expanded operations to seven other African
countries, describes itself on its homepage as ‘a mobile commerce company operating
a payments ecosystem connecting financial sector customers, Mobile service providers
and businesses to their increasingly mobile consumers’ (Cellulant Corporation n.d.).

Table 1. Mobile music services.

Service Description of Service
Ringtone A service offered by mobile service providers and third-party digital content firms that allows a user to
download polyphonic or ‘realtone’ ringtones to her phone. The user incurs a one-off cost when
downloading the ringtone, often charged as a premium SMS charge (see Gopinath 2013).
Ringback tone A service offered by mobile service providers, typically in partnership with digital content intermediaries,
that allows a user to select an audio file (generally a popular song) to replace the standard signal tone
set by the operator software when another user calls her. The user incurs a one-off or recurring fee for
this service. (See reference to Safaricom’s Skiza service below.)
Music A service offered by mobile service providers and third-party digital content firms that allows a user to
download download music files (typically encoded in MP3 format) directly to her phone. The user incurs a one-off
cost when downloading a song, often charged as a premium SMS charge. (See Musibuy and Mdundo
below.)
Music A service offered by mobile service providers and third-party digital content firms that allows a user to
streaming stream music from a selected catalogue for a recurring fee. This type of service is often offered on a
‘freemium’ basis: that is, at no charge to the user when interspersed with commercial advertisements.
Mobile service providers often offer streaming packages, where data is included in the music
subscription or music streaming is included in data packages. (See Spinlet, Kleek, and Tigo Music
below.)
Source: The authors.
 JOURNAL OF AFRICAN CULTURAL STUDIES 201

African digital content intermediaries have shown great flexibility not only in how they
have across multiple sectors, but also in how they have worked within the music sector.
This is especially true in Kenya, where the phenomenal success of Safaricom’s Skiza
Tunes ringback tone service has spawned what might reasonably be called a digital
content industry. Among the dozen or so digital content intermediaries that have
worked with Safaricom to supply content for Skiza (see Table 2 for a list at the time of
writing), two – Bernsoft and MTech – have leveraged their footholds in the music sector
to enter into an array of business arrangements with music creators beyond licensing
their works. Bernsoft initiated an expansion of its music-related activities in 2011 by posi-
tioning itself as a producer of music content (including music videos). It began offering
artists funding for their productions in exchange for rights and/or distribution deals,
and even opened its own recording facility staffed with a noted producer from Tanzania.
Around the same time, the East African subsidiary of MTech Nigeria started expanding its
relationships with artists into the areas of management and publishing services as well as
production. The move was the brainchild of the subsidiary’s Nigerian CEO Ikechukwu
Anoke, who ultimately founded his own, Nairobi-based record label, Taurus Musik.
Third-party m-commerce platforms aggregate and distribute music content, sometimes
in direct partnership with a mobile service provider. These firms compete not only with
each other, but also with m-commerce platforms run by mobile service providers
(except on ringback tone platforms, which are the oligopoly of mobile service providers).
There has been a great deal of experimentation in the area of m-commerce platforms in
African countries, some of which has been fostered by so-called business incubator hubs,
organisations that support tech startups with funding (or access to potential investors) as
well as other development assistance. The short-lived Ghanaian mobile music streaming
platform Streemio, for example, was launched in 2011 with seed funding from Accra-
based incubator MEST shortly before being acquired by a larger African company,
Spinlet (discussed below) (Thekkepat 2011). And the Kenyan mobile music download plat-
form Mdundo, which arrived at its current freemium subscription model after making
news with an innovative plan of using scratchcards to work with artists in building a
user base, has been supported since 2012 by Google-backed business incubator
88 mph (Kerongo 2013).

Table 2. Skiza Tunes (Safaricom) digital content intermediaries (as of March 2018).
Digital Content Firm Content Provided
Interactive Media Services ‘Local and International’
Liberty Afrika Technologies ‘Local Gospel, Local Vernacular, East Africa’
Ltd
MTech Nigeria ‘Naija [Nigerian popular music] and Wacky Tunes’
Bernsoft Interactive Ltd ‘Reggae, Classical, Dance, Kwaito, Rock, Techno, Country, Sermons and Comedy’
Cellulant Kenya Ltd ‘Kenyan Gospel, Kenyan Vernacular/Pop, Wacky Tunes, Inspirational, International’
Onfon Media Ltd ‘Kenyan Gospel, Pop, Funny tunes, vernacular, name tunes, corporate, horoscopes, bible
verses, Jokes, prayers, foreign languages, signature names, jobs, sports news, breaking
news, inspiration tnes [sic]’
Bluewater Group Ltd ‘SME & Corporate tunes, Kenyan Gospel, Kenyan Pop, Vernacular, Wacky Tunes’
Xpedia Management Ltd ‘Local gospel, Local vernacular, East Africa’
Enable-IT Ltd ‘Spoken Word’
Spice Vas Kenya Ltd ‘Spice Local, Bongo, International, Football, Islamic, Motivational’
User Experience ‘Spoken word, Corporate Tunes’
Technologies Ltd
Source: Safaricom (2017).
202 C. DE BEUKELAER AND A. J. EISENBERG

Experimentation in African music m-commerce has entered a new phase, as larger cor-
porations started operations. Such entities are motivated by the potential for growth in
music streaming on mobile networks, which is set to pick up as infrastructural and tech-
nological improvements lower the cost of such services for African consumers. The year
2013 saw the launch of two large music m-commerce platforms in Africa, Spinlet and
Kleek. Spinlet, billed as the African challenger to iTunes, operates as a streaming and
music sales platform with a particular focus on mobile network functionality (Koetsier
2013). Kleek, co-founded by Korean tech firm Samsung and French-American media cor-
poration Universal Music (a subsidiary of the French Vivendi Group), offers African content
marketed exclusively for Africans, using a dedicated Android app which is exclusively avail-
able for Samsung devices (Welch 2013).
A different sort of mobile-based music streaming platform, based on a different sort of
corporate arrangement, arrived in Africa in 2014 under the name Tigo Music. This is a col-
laboration between French music streaming company Deezer and Luxembourg-registered
telecom giant Millicom, the latter operating under the brand name Tigo in Chad, DRC,
Ghana, Senegal, Rwanda, and Tanzania, in addition to six Latin American countries. Tigo
Music offers Tigo network subscribers access to Deezer’s sizable international music cata-
logue plus local music content for a monthly fee. While it has yet to make a significant
impact in Africa – at the time of writing, the platform is only available in two African
countries, Ghana and Tanzania – Millicom touts its popularity in Latin America as evidence
of its potential for success on the African continent (Millicom 2014).
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry’s 2015 Digital Music Report
notes a general trend in ‘emerging markets’ toward ‘bundling partnerships’ of the sort rep-
resented by Tigo Music (IFPI 2015). This makes sense, given the growing demand for inter-
net access across the Global South. Millicom’s stated objective in introducing Tigo Music is
not only to build a profitable music platform, but also ‘to drive data adoption and usage on
both mobile and fixed platforms’ (Millicom 2015, 22). The complexity of licensing music in
African countries does however represent a major obstacle for such initiatives. Licensing
music for digital platforms is complex even in the Global North, as intellectual property
rights laws and administrative structures are slow to adapt to new technological realities
(Wagman 2009). In African countries there is the added problem of what Rotimi Fawole of
Spinlet recently referred to as the ‘varying level of maturity of intellectual property enfor-
cement in the region’ (Kaufman 2016). The ‘immaturity’ of an IP regime may, of course,
enable entrepreneurial activity in music m-commerce, by presenting fewer legal barriers
to start-ups. But the march of WTO-driven IP harmonisation means that these enabling
factors are likely to be temporary. In Ghana, Kenya, and many other African countries
today, developing a digital music platform necessitates a significant investment in
resources and personnel solely for dealing with licensing. For its part, Millicom has
invested in the creation of its own licensing process, partnering with South Africa-based
digital music publisher AfriCori in a ‘venture called “Africa Music Rights” … [which] will
fund, acquire and manage music rights across the continent’ (Millicom 2014).

Hardware manufacturers
Mobile phone manufacturers employ multiple strategies to compete in Africa’s rapidly
growing consumer markets, many of which lead firms toward involvement in local music
 JOURNAL OF AFRICAN CULTURAL STUDIES 203

sectors. Take, for example, Korean telecom giant Samsung, recently ranked by Brand Africa
as Africa’s most admired brand.3 Along with offering a special range of devices for the
African continent, with features such as ‘dual SIM’ functionality, and ensuring good custo-
mer service across the continent, the company employs local popular music celebrities in
African countries for various marketing activities (from television and radio advertisements
to meet-and-greets at shopping malls), and actively markets their devices in these countries
as music players. This last strategy dovetails nicely with another possible avenue for gen-
erating revenue: selling music ‘content’. It is not surprising, then, that Samsung has
entered into this business in Africa, establishing an Africa-only music streaming service
called The Kleek, in partnership with Universal Music Group (Welch 2013).
Samsung is not the only mobile phone manufacturer to mobilise music in their business
strategies on the African continent. Finnish manufacturer Nokia launched its first music
sales platform for Africa in 2009, and has engaged in a number of music-related marketing
activities, including the rap competition ‘Don’t Break the Beat,’ which was first launched in
East Africa in 2012 and subsequently brought to West Africa. Nokia researchers even
explored possibilities for adding special functionality to mobile phones sold in Africa to
facilitate not only music listening, but also music production and distribution (Impio
et al. 2009). Meanwhile, in 2013, Ghanaian hardware manufacturer rLG demonstrated an
innovative mode of musical marketing, by taking part in a local artist’s CD release
(Boateng 2013). The company branded all copies of the CD with their logo and distributed
the album for free via The Daily Graphic, a popular entertainment newspaper.

Dynamic alignments
As the foregoing reveals, while music may not be the linchpin of MTT sectors from a
financial perspective, it plays a major role in shaping these sectors. Music ‘content’ –
that is, music transformed by digital technology into a commodity form that is uniquely
aggregable and transportable via mobile telecommunication networks – sets up particular
relations between the different types of players in African MTT sectors. Mobile service
providers provide data transfer for selling or renting music content, but require both
content and hardware to make data bundles useful to consumers; digital content firms
provide content, but require data transfer and devices to reach customers; and mobile
hardware manufacturers provide devices, but require content and data transfer to
make them attractive. This means that the oligonomic concentration of power that charac-
terises music sectors is based less on vertical integration of control over copyrighted
material than on the large-scale transformation of artists into ‘brands’ (Osumare 2014;
Shipley 2013).
Technology firms have been involved in music sectors since the dawn of sound record-
ing: manufacturers of radio receivers, vinyl record players, cassette decks, compact disc
players, and MP3 playback devices have had significant business interests in music pro-
duction and sales (see Hesmondhalgh and Meier 2017). African music sectors have
been no exception to this; however, the explosion in illicit copying and distribution of
recorded music in the 1990s led to a rise in makeshift networks of value creation and
extraction (see Larkin 2008) that significantly eroded the mutual interest of technology
and music companies on the continent. Thus, while it would be historically incorrect to
call it a ‘new’ phenomenon, the music-MTT convergence nevertheless represents a
204 C. DE BEUKELAER AND A. J. EISENBERG

significant break with the political economy of music that had been common across most
of Africa since the rise of illicit copying and distribution.
Whereas African music sectors since the 1990s have largely cohered around the trans-
position of music into a commodity that generates value in the forms of royalties and,
more significantly, fame (or celebrity capital, which may be translated to economic
capital through celebrity marketing) (Shipley 2013), MTT sectors construct a different set
of relations between music and economic value. Digital content firms, for example,
extract value from music ‘content’ by brokering licensing fees between creators and
mobile service providers. These firms may be in the business of music sales, but they
are not exactly in the business of selling music. They profit not by exchanging music,
but by retaining control over popular ‘content’ and acquiring control over new
‘content’. For network service providers, meanwhile, music – even music as ‘content’ –
is sometimes merely a condition of exchange, as value is extracted through sales of
data bundles that allow users access to the sounds they desire. Hardware manufacturers
play a significant role as well, because their devices are necessary tools to playback
music, while music increases the appeal of newer and more advanced devices that
allow for greater content storage and better playback options. Such capacities also play
a part in marketing strategies between hardware manufacturers, keen to associate
phones with entertainment functions beyond mere connectivity. At the same time,
both network service providers and hardware manufacturers leverage their connections
to the music sector by using music and musicians to promote their brands.
The conjunction of the digital music commodity and mobile telecommunications in
Africa has thus set the stage for multiple forms of ‘musical capitalism’ (Born 2013, 51),
each of which entails a particular convergence of the music and MTT sectors. We describe
these convergences as dynamic alignments, in order to highlight the fact that each bears a
distinct trajectory determined by a local ICT infrastructure and regulatory environment as
well as the general contingencies of entrepreneurial activity. Figure 1, a revised version of a
back-of-the-envelope sketch from our initial notes for this paper, offers an overview of
these dynamic alignments, by focusing on three key activities through which they are
enacted: Brand Marketing, M-Commerce, and Industry Patronage. While in practice
these activities often overlap and bleed into one another, laying them out separately
offers a sense of the diversity of actors, interests, and strategies involved in what might
otherwise be glossed as a more general ‘convergence’ of two sectors.
Rather than being an exhaustive analysis of all dynamic alignments, this figure shows
the structural mutual reliance of music and MTT sectors. We considered approaching
our analysis by working through all these alignments, but that would have made the situ-
ation seem too disjunct. In reality, across these dynamic alignments one often finds a con-
centration of power that lends coherence to the broader convergence they represent. In
Kenya, for example, all of the most visible and influential dynamic alignments of the music
and MTT sectors have involved a single corporation – Safaricom.
What this suggests is that there is really nothing all that new about the ways in which
‘mobilisation’ configures relations of power in African music sectors. On the contrary, it
would seem that the dynamic alignments of the music and MTT sectors in African
countries entail power imbalances that perpetuate, and are perpetuated by, flows of
capital through the oligonomic bottlenecks that have long characterised music sectors
in the Global North, and to a lesser degree in Africa and other parts of the Global South.
 JOURNAL OF AFRICAN CULTURAL STUDIES 205

Figure 1. The dynamic alignments of the music and MTT sectors in African countries.

Low royalty yields and limited licensing opportunities make corporate and promotional
live events the most lucrative activities in Ghanaian and Kenyan music sectors. The situ-
ation is not unique to these countries, of course. Across the African continent, and
indeed elsewhere in the world, the value of music increasingly lies in what the attention
of audiences is worth to advertisers as corporations look ever more toward ‘emotion-
based, cultural and lifestyle-oriented marketing strategies’ in order to get noticed in the
overloaded contemporary mediascape (Meier 2011, 403; see Pier 2015; Shipley 2013).
In this context, MTT and music sectors are increasingly reliant on each other. Mobile
service providers face strong competition, limiting their gains on voice and SMS rates
(see Supplement 1). They thus seek to increase turnover and profits through data
usage, which remains a growth market, while also strengthening their brand identity
and brand loyalty in order to retain and strengthen their market position. Meanwhile,
digital content firms rely on mobile service providers for the infrastructure and client
base they provide. These firms serve as intermediaries – content gatekeepers – and there-
fore work to secure access to musicians willing to license content and networks able to
facilitate the marketing and consumption of this content.
In Kenya, while musicians seem to recognise the oligonomic character of the mobilised
music sector, they have opted to embrace digital content firms as organisations that can
work with them, much in the same way that musicians have worked with labels as see-
mingly inevitable partners. This has been particularly true of musicians with established
reputations and fan bases, as they have more power to negotiate special deals with
these firms. Some Kenyan musicians have even sided with these firms against CMOs,
organisations that ostensibly only exist to facilitate musicians’ royalty collection, in legal
battles over m-commerce royalty distribution. For many musicians, this may seem like
the only way to generate income from recorded music sales, as the fully established avail-
ability of cheap and easy-to-use copying technologies (cassette tapes and MP3 files) have
challenged the artificial scarcity strategies that, for some time, were relatively easy to
206 C. DE BEUKELAER AND A. J. EISENBERG

maintain through record sales. The actual revenues through channels provided by digital
content firms remain low, as rights holders get a meagre cut – though musicians often use
mobile distribution as well as music-based advertisements and endorsement deals as ways
to ‘launch’ new tracks (Klein 2009, 59–78; Meier 2016, 9), bypassing expensive and cumber-
some payola practices.
Different strategies exist to sell music content to consumers through mobile telecom-
munication networks. But a common feature of these strategies is that a limited catalogue
of music commodities (song or album downloads, streams, or ringback tone subscriptions)
is made available to a large client base at low prices. Whether controlled by record labels
or MTT firms, then, African music sectors have introduced (or perhaps re-introduced) their
oligonomic character.

Struggling with oligonomy

On May 20th 2016, The Standard, one of Kenya’s major national dailies, published an article
on Kenyan artists’ struggles to receive fair remuneration for their music from digital
content intermediaries. In it, Eunice Njeri, one of the most popular artists on the platform,
attests,
I got to see the accounts and how much my songs, which were signed to Liberty Afrika [see
Table 2], make and I am not happy … I was told my song made Sh1 million in a six-month
period, when in fact it had made about Sh24 million (Mwaghesha 2016).

Njeri’s comment is one among many that have circulated in the Kenyan media that
reveal a consciousness of how the convergence of the music and MTT sectors, while
perhaps mutually beneficial for the sectors writ large, has reproduced the oligopsonic
power relations of the ‘old’ music economies to the detriment of musicians’ livelihoods.
How to respond to this situation has been a puzzle for Kenyan artists like Njeri, one that
has not been solved – indeed, has perhaps been exacerbated – by the expanded role
of collective management organisations in the wake of WTO-driven copyright reforms
(Perullo and Eisenberg 2014).
From the earliest days of music m-commerce in Kenya in the first decade of the 2000s,
CMOs have been struggling to wrest control from digital content firms. In the beginning,
the Music Copyright Society of Kenya (MCSK) – the only Kenyan music CMO in operation
before 2006 – established itself as a content aggregator and supplier. But this didn’t last
long, as digital content firms with greater capacity to offer these services quickly
entered into the field. In more recent years, all three of Kenya’s registered music CMOs
– MCSK, Kenya Association of Music Producers (KAMP), and the Performers Rights
Society of Kenya (PRISK) – have pursued negotiation and litigation to gain control over
the flow of m-commerce royalties. In May 2016, the High Court of Kenya at Nairobi
ruled that royalties should be paid through CMOs, not PRSPs. This was widely seen as a
major victory for the CMOs.4 But the victory was short lived, as the High Court of Kenya
at Malindi reversed the decision only months later, declaring it a violation of artists’ con-
stitutionally guaranteed rights to organise with the digital content firms.5
Ostensibly, CMOs seek to control m-commerce royalties in order to better regulate and,
more importantly, increase payments to artists. At the same time, they aim to secure their
institutional role in a music sector that is increasingly reliant on dynamic alignments with
 JOURNAL OF AFRICAN CULTURAL STUDIES 207

the MTT sector. At least some Kenyan artists have seen a potential conflict of interest in this
situation – one that threatens their own ability to secure the best arrangements for them-
selves. A few have even sided with digital content firms in court against the CMOs.6
In the war between the CMOs and digital content firms, then, Kenyan artists have been
like the blades of grass in the old Swahili proverb about who actually gets hurt when two
water buffalo fight. But African artists may not be entirely powerless in dealing with MTT
firms. After all, MTTs do not simply view artists as generators of ‘content’. Writing about
hiplife music in Ghana, Jesse Weaver Shipley argues, ‘instead of corporations mediating
the relationship between consumers and producers, musicians are facilitating the relation-
ship between corporations and publics’ (Shipley 2013, 283). Halifu Osumare fleshes out
this argument, noting, ‘Ghanaian hiplife artists are primed as product endorsers, corporate
spokespersons, and symbols of the cosmopolitan ideology and lifestyle that accompany
corporate privatization’ (Osumare 2014, 189). Taking this analysis directly to the matter
at hand, Osumare further argues that mobile service providers, which are the key expo-
nents of corporate encroachment on people’s lives across the African continent, need
to engage the entire population of countries like Ghana in order to secure solid returns
(2014, 197). In this context, the strong competition between mobile service providers
drives them to pursue aggressive marketing campaigns in which they draw on the popu-
larity of musicians as currency to establish, strengthen, and consolidate their market share
in these emerging markets. This gives artists a bit of leverage in their dealings with MTT
firms, which a few have used to strike lucrative deals. That said, most individual music
artists in Africa find themselves without much leverage in their dealings with MTT firms,
especially large mobile service providers like Safaricom. Rather than being bona fide part-
ners for the music economies, she insists, MTTs’ motivations are ‘only about exploiting
culture for financial gain, without genuine respect for music’ (Osumare 2014, 205). This
bleak picture raises the question of how the seemingly irreversible convergence of
African music and MTT sectors can be regulated and enforced to rectify the power imbal-
ances that are exacerbated rather than mitigated by digital innovations.

Conclusion
The rise of digital media technologies has created new forms of intermediation and inter-
dependence in music sectors worldwide. Our research in Kenya and Ghana suggests that
the changes in the African music sectors have some characteristics that do not mirror what
has been happening in the West. We contend that the influence of MTTs on music distri-
bution in African contexts warrants empirical and conceptual engagement with the
characteristics of the shifts in the African music sectors as a sui generis logic rather than
a mutation of a Western model (De Beukelaer 2017; Perullo 2011). This model, we
argue, has emerged through the particular constellation of intermediation and interde-
pendence of music sectors and MTTs across Africa.
While in the USA and elsewhere in the Global North ‘the computing industry is now one
of the key developers of new means of finding, playing, storing, and experiencing music’
(Morris 2015, 21), in Africa it is the MTT sector that plays this role. In both cases, music
sectors own and control large amounts of content, but require high-tech devices and
distribution networks to reach consumers; while device manufacturers and network
service providers need music and other content to make their products and services
208 C. DE BEUKELAER AND A. J. EISENBERG

attractive (Morris 2015, 21). This mutual reliance creates opportunities for all parties
involved, while also opening up new avenues for predatory companies to strive for vertical
integration across media.
While inherently unequal, the convergence of music and MTT sectors in African
countries fosters new business models and strategies that benefit actors on both sides.
New stakeholders with varying degrees of power, influence, and interests have created
a volatile context in need of new forms of regulation and legislation. These should
account both for the tremendous opportunities that the dynamic alignments of MTT
and music sectors bring about, and thoughtfully consider how to mitigate the exploitative
relations and oligonomic tendencies.

Notes
1. The term MP3 also refers to the format, that is, to the ‘container technology’ that makes (or
seems to make) the MP3 music commodity a ‘thing’ (Sterne 2012, 184).
2. Supplement 1 offers an overview of the activities of mobile service providers in Ghana and
Kenya, including data connectivity, subscription rates, and (for Kenya) mobile money transfers.
3. Rankings are available at Brand Africa’s interactive website, http://www.brandafrica.net/
Rankings.aspx.
4. The headline by Kenyan daily The Star—‘PRSPs Trounced as Court Favours CMOs in Distribution
of Skiza Royalties’ (Kerongo 2016)—gives a sense of the tenor of the coverage of the ruling.
5. For a brief overview of these cases and links to the rulings, see Matu-Mureithi (2016).
6. Kenyan legal blogger Victor Nzomo registers the irony of the situation thusly:
[O]ne wonders whether the rights holders involved in these law suits understand that it
is THEIR royalties and those of other deserving rights holders that are being used to pay
the legal bills of the collecting societies to defend these suits (Nzomo 2016).

Acknowledgements
We presented previous versions of this paper at ECREA (Prague) in November 2016 through the
panel Big Tech Meets Culture: The Case of Music chaired by David Hesmondhalgh and Keith Negus,
and at the workshop Industries Culturelles et Plateformes Numériques (Cultural Industries and Digital
Platforms) hosted by Bertrand Legendre from LABEX ICCA (Industries Culturelles & Création Artistique)
at Maison de la Recherche, Université Sorbonne Paris Cité, November 2016. The paper further benefited
from a roundtable we both took part on Music Economies in Sub-Saharan Africa (chaired by Alex
Perullo) at the African Studies Association Conference in Washington DC, December 2016. Georgina
Born provided valuable input and advice for Andrew Eisenberg’s research in Nairobi, which was
carried out under the auspices of her European Research Council-funded Advanced Grant Music,
Digitization, Mediation: Towards Interdisciplinary Music Studies at the University of Oxford. Ben
Morgan provided helpful comments on a draft version of the paper.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding
This work was supported by the European Cultural Foundation (Cultural Policy Research Award (2012))
and FP7 Ideas: European Research Council (249598: Music, Digitization, Mediation: Towards Interdisci-
plinary Music Studies).
 JOURNAL OF AFRICAN CULTURAL STUDIES 209

ORCID
Christiaan De Beukelaer http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9045-9979
Andrew J. Eisenberg http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6976-7398

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