The Digitisation of the Kenyan Recording Industry

By Andrew J. Eisenberg

I carried out field research in Nairobi, Kenya between July 2011 and August 2012, on the ways in which the global(ising) processes of economic liberalisation and digital revolution have transformed, and continue to transform, Kenya’s music recording industry.

Production: the millennium music explosion and after. Following the liberalisation of Kenyan media in the 1990s, competition for the ears of the youth led to a brief period of hegemony for US hip-hop and R&B on Kenya’s radio airwaves. This new black cosmopolitan soundscape was soon met with a response in the form of local youth-oriented music genres grounded stylistically in hip-hop with inflections of Jamaican dancehall, Caribbean zouk, and Congolese soukous, a process of indigenisation that came largely thanks to the relative availability and (within a few years) affordability of prosumer keyboard sequencers, personal computers with high-end sound cards and pirated digital audio software. The advent of new digital music technologies in Kenya during the 1990s afforded new production strategies centred on the DAW (digital audio workstation—a configuration of software and hardware designed for recording, editing, and playing back digital audio) and the role of ‘creative producer’ (a music professional who uses the DAW to combine the tasks of recording, composing and arranging). Such strategies were, and have remained, essential to the ways in which young, mostly male Kenyan creatives and entrepreneurs have (literally and figuratively) remixed African American and Afro-Caribbean musical cultures for Kenyan audiences.

The Kenyan recording industry continued to evolve after the youth music explosion, spawning new genres, some of which became foci of my research. These include ‘Afro-fusion’, which delves deep into Kenya’s ethnic musical traditions for an authentically ‘Kenyan’ sound, and so-called ‘Afro-based’ musics (‘Afro-soul’, ‘Afro-pop’, ‘Afro-acoustic’, ‘Afro-electro’, ‘Afro-edge’), which seek an authentic Kenyan sound that is nevertheless cosmopolitan and not ethnically marked. These genres are noteworthy, in part, because of the patronage they receive from NGOs and other transnational patrons interested in ‘development’ through culture.

Distribution: the promise of digital music commerce. The new dynamism in Kenyan music production at the turn of the twenty-first century seemed to offer no solution to the vexing problem of music distribution in Kenya, generally believed by industry stakeholders to have been caused by piracy. But a sliver of hope emerged from another direction at this moment. Digital technologies seemed to hold the key to begin selling properly licensed Kenyan music en masse.

During my fieldwork, more attention was paid to the promises of ‘m-commerce’ for music distribution in Kenya than to those of ‘e-commerce’. Recent surveys had revealed that at any given moment, one out of every two human beings sending money by mobile phone was Kenyan. It was only logical that Kenyans would also consume music on their mobile devices. Meanwhile, mobile network operators were facing the reality that voice and messaging services had become much less profitable. They were also looking to music m-commerce as a saviour. As a result, Kenya’s largest mobile network operator became deeply engaged in popular music, as did a number of other mobile communications technology firms the likes of which had never before played any part in the Kenyan recording industry. It is no exaggeration to say that Kenya’s emerging digital content industry is poised to take over the country’s music recording industry.