ABSTRACT
In Mali, as in most other West African countries, the popular music industry has undergone major changes with the transition to broadband through 3G technology. A new musical ecosystem is emerging, in which the mobile phone is not only the main means of accessing music, but is also contributing to the transformation of creation processes, to listening, exchange and storage practices, to tastes, sociabilities and the imaginaries linked to music. This chapter follows step by step, a project implemented by the ZikMali company in the field of digital music distribution. An ethnographic approach allows us to question the commonly accepted idea of the mobile phone as ‘digital provide’. The chapter highlights the hurdles, constraints and challenges that must be overcome today in Mali in order to simply build a digital ‘access’ to music. Finally, it situates this case study relative to other work on the digitisation of cultural industries in the Global North. If the contexts of construction of a commercial offer of online music are quite similar, the underlying representations, logics and values are much more localised.
