Evolution of the Recording Industry in Z

2009

I declare that this work has not been previously submitted in whole, or in part, for the award of any degree. It is my own work. Each significant contribution to, and quotation in, this dissertation from the work, or works, of other people has been attributed, and has been cited and referenced.

2014

The purpose of this research was to gather information about the production, marketing and distribution of Zambian contemporary music by Zambian musicians. Very little information has been documented about the development of the Zambian music industry, particularly from the perspective of those within the industry. As a result this study attempted to add to this knowledge. To achieve this Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical concepts of ‘fields’ and ‘habitus’ were used to gain an understanding of what affects the creation of art forms such as music as well as the structures and underlying processes within the music industry. The concept of ‘fields’ usefully framed an explanation of the struggles and connections within the various fields in the industry and a view of the Zambian music industry in relation to the international industry. To gather the data necessary for this research a qualitative approach was utilised involving semistructured in-depth questionnaires from twenty-three interviewees. These interviewees were selected from various sectors of the music industry in an attempt to gain a holistic perspective of the industry in the 21st century. There were four subgroups: the artists (singers, rappers and instrumentalists), managers, radio DJs, and a miscellaneous group made up of the remaining participants, a Sounds Arcade manager, a music journalist, the National Arts Council Chairperson, a Zambia Music Copyright Protection Society (ZAMCOPS) administrator, and the then President of the Zambia Association of Musicians (ZAM). With the limited exposure to formal musical, instrumental and production training, musicians, instrumentalists, managers and studio production personnel interviewed had had to learn their craft on-the-job. This limited knowledge appears to add to the hindrance of the development of careers and the industry, particularly in terms of how to register and distribute music correctly to earn royalties and protect their intellectual property against piracy. From an institutional level piracy is being addressed more forcefully with the introduction of holograms and the tightening of policies and structures to do with the music industry

2019

This study examines young Zambian men who are aspiring hip hop artists in Lusaka and the meanings they make of the representations of masculinity in Empire, a popular US television drama. Broadcast locally via satellite on the South African cable network, DStv, Empire narrates the story of a family of powerful men as they battle for the control of Empire, a successful hip-hop label. Of significance is how the programme’s representations of masculinity resonate with the young men’s own ideas of masculinity within a highly patriarchal and conservative urban African space. The young male hip-hop artists encounter their everyday experiences in a context of a range of socio-economic challenges within the urban space of Lusaka which presents them with very limited economic opportunities and resources. Underpinned by a constructivist approach, this reception study explores how these young male artists encounter their everyday experiences in the city and how its structural constraints are n...

The Journal for Transdisciplinary Research in Southern Africa, 2014

In the early 1950s the Vatican accepted the translation of Catholic hymnals into local Zambian languages and the incorporation of indigenous musical instruments into the liturgical music. This development inspired a group of priests and seminarians, led by Father Charles Rijthoven from Ilondola mission in Northern Zambia. Because of its geographical location, a Bemba indigenous musical style derived from ingomba (royal musicians) was adopted and is now commonly referred to as ubuomba (lit. being a royal musician). The word ingomba is derived from the word omba (to clap) as in omba amakuku (to produce low-toned claps by means of capped palms), a characteristic which forms the core of rhythmic structure of the musical style. Besides hand clapping, ubuomba songs are usually accompanied by double-headed drums known as inshingili (hour-glass shaped drum). Over the years the ubuomba style has spread to other parts of the country and formed a Catholic liturgical music identity. This study tries, by way of ethnographic investigation, to outline the way in which the ubuomba musical style has been used to negotiate the indigenisation of liturgical music in the Catholic Church in Zambia. The focus of this study is on the origins and processes of development of the ubuomba musical style and how it relates to wellbeing within the Catholic Church; these developments are based on song text, instrumental accompaniment, dance and mime. The 'contemporalisation' and 'commercialisation' of the ubuomba musical style to incorporate Western musical instruments such as guitars, drum kits and synthesisers is examined with reference to internal and external musical influences.

2014

Violation of copyright law has caused quite a stir in Zimbabwe’s Sungura 1 music performance. Some prominent musicians accuse upcoming artistes of illegally copying their music, although the popular musicians themselves developed it by modeling on foreign popular musicians’ songs, which were on the local market and shows in Zimbabwe. By tracing the development of sungura from the 1960s to contemporary times using a diffusionist paradigm, this paper exposes how sungura artists have developed a genre that owes its popularity to record companies’ policies, the media as well as the sungura artists’ virtuosity in fusing foreign musical genres (especially Congolese, Kenyan, Tanzanian and South African) and local indigenous traditional styles (mhande, mbende, jiti, shangara). We interviewed sungura artists, recording company personnel and music promoters to elicit their views on the major influences on the development of museve. 2 Based on insights drawn from musical ethnography, the paper...

2020

Violation of copyright law has caused quite a stir in Zimbabwe's Sungura 1

The Internet and mobile phones are changing the face of radio across the world. Their appropriation by private, public and community radio is transforming radio as a medium thus making it, at least in principle, more accessible through multiple platforms such as webcasting and mobile streaming. In most cases, these technological transformations have had some profound ramifications on radio‘s institutional cultures and practices especially with regards to the way radio produces and disseminates its content and interacts with audiences. Digitization and convergence are not merely blurring the boundaries between radio and other media, but have a direct impact on journalistic practices in terms of the gathering, manufacturing, and subsequent presentation of content to audiences. Audiences themselves are seen as becoming increasingly more actively involved in radio content production and dissemination through online platforms like Websites, Facebook, Twitter, chat forums, podcasts and indeed mobile facilities like SMS (texting) and voice calls. Theoretically, convergence has therefore empowered ordinary people to tell their stories themselves through radio. Scholars have variously referred to this new experience as ̳citizen journalism‘, ̳participatory journalism‘, ̳citizen-generated media‘, ̳we media‘, ̳grassroots media‘, ̳self service media‘ to emphasize the notions of inclusion and participatory communication that are often associated with digital media (See Atton, 2003, Gillmor, 2006; Kolodzy, 2006, Allan, 2010). In most cases, however, the celebration of the emancipatory power of these so-called ̳technologies of freedom‘ (Morriset, 2004), is often empirically informed by the socio-economic and technological contexts of the industrialized North, especially Europe and North America. Yet the appropriation of convergence and digitization by the media and their audiences can hardly be said to be unidirectional and always predictable across the world. Hence, this study is a contribution to the global debate on how new ICTs are influencing radio‘s institutional cultures and practices within the context of the Southern African region. It focuses on radio convergence in four countries in the region namely Zimbabwe, Zambia, South Africa, and Malawi. While these countries certainly offer variegated social and technological experiences that have varying imprints on the appropriation and uses of mobile phones and the Internet by radio institutions, they also share certain similarities which have helped the study to generate some analytical observations on trends and patterns in radio production, dissemination, consumption and the emerging audience participatory cultures. The study is broadly institutional and focuses mainly on radio organisations‘ uptake of the new ICTs in the production and dissemination of news and current affairs programmes. However, it also interrogates how the digitisation of this institution is influencing participation by citizens in radio programmes on the one hand, and issues of governance and public concern, on the other hand. As such the concerns of the research are three fold and can be summed up as follows: To examine how the selected public, private and community radio stations in the 4 countries use the Internet and mobile phones to enhance audience participation in news and current affairs programming. To evaluate how these uses are promoting bottom-up and democratic participatory cultures occasioned by convergent radio through Web 2.0, SMS, Voice calls, E-mail, etc. To discuss how participatory cultures on radio create a potential for civic engagement on development and governance issues. Philosophically, the debate on the benefits of the new ICTs to the media and society alike is by no means a simple one. It has generally been characterized by two seemingly radical and incommensurable schools of thought. On the one hand, is what has been variously referred to as techno-euphorists or technological determinists. Their views on the relationship between digital media and the society are characterized by eulogistic accounts of what new ICTs can do for individuals, institutions, and society. The advent of the new media of the Internet and mobile phones has re-ignited this optimism where the information society and its concomitant innovations in communications are blindly celebrated as the panacea to all human development challenges. In Africa,thenewwaveoftechnological ̳hype‘and ̳utopianbliss‘1 bouncedbackinthe1990swiththe spread of the Internet and mobile phones across the continent. We heard the hollow and apocalyptic claims of the end of the mass media and the mass audience just as we heard the optimistic and ethereal accounts of citizen empowerment virtual public spheres and network societies that are characterized by seamless spaces of participation and free expression for the citizen. Technological determinists continue to advance a commonsensical and utopian view of the neutral to ICTs and their universal and linear effects everywhere. In doing so, they have often overlook critical questions of the social, political, economic and organizational contexts of technologies use. These questions are considered fundamentally important in this study as they shape how the radio institutions and their audiences are likely to use digital media and harness other benefits that are occasioned by digitization and media convergence. Hence, by way of a literature review, this study begins by giving a comprehensive overview of the socio-economic, political and technological regimes that constitute the contexts of the uptake of the Internet and mobile phones by radio and its audiences. Five critical structural points that inform the uptake of ICTs by radio stations and their audiences are highlighted and consist of the following: Constitutional and legal environments, Political and economic environments, Radio and ICTs ownership and funding, and the regulation of broadcasting. For example, the use and relevance of convergent radio therefore largely depended on how widespread the new ICTs as ̳technologies of freedom‘ are used by audiences. Questions of the availability and affordability of these new technologies are important in understanding public participation levels in convergent radio, especially the question of who participates and the kinds of discourses that emerge from that participation. There is always a financial cost tied to the access of these new ICTs and the services they provide. For example, although the Internet and mobile network prices in the region are slowly coming down as a result of the combined effects of regulatory intervention and competition between service providers, they have been and continue to be for the most part, very high and prohibitive to the ordinary person. For example, until recently in Zimbabwe, Econet Wireless 1 For further details of Technological determinism in Africa, see Mudhai, (2009: 1). 14 tended to abuse its market dominance in mobile broadband charging as much as US$98 a gigabyte.2 In South Africa, mobile phone operators charges remained in the top 5 highest in the world charging R1. 29c per minute. When the South African government proposed a 60c per minute through ICASA, they refused and pegged their price at 89c per minute instead (Business day, 2010). Theoretically, the questions of corporate dominance in new ICTs are embedded with a Critical Political Economy (CPE) critique of new media technologies. A very radical Marxian strand of theory is made of technological pessimists or techno-essentialists who argue that digital media in their convergent and divergent form are always in service of corporate profit maximization, domination and power. They argue that technologies, including new ICTs, represent and advance the interests of the powerful in society and claims about their potential for promoting human freedoms and civic engagement are nothing but just an illusion or mirage.3 In researching convergence and radio in Southern Africa, this project clearly took a middle of the ground critique by emphasizing the social character of technologies. We argue that digital media do not have a ̳singular essence...and can be reconstructed to play different roles in different social systems‘ (Feenberg, 1999: 7). They can empower or disempower citizens depending on the social context. For example, the foregoing examples on Zimbabwe serve to demonstrate how cost of digital media services can be inimical to sustained participation by audiences in radio programmes and public affairs. Indeed, this means that the claims of the impact of the Internet and mobile phones on radio‘s institutional cultures, practices, and the participation by audiences have to be subjected to specific social and organizational contexts within which such technologies are used. Following Slevin (2000, 155, therefore, ̳any meaningful analysis of the impact of the Internet... [and mobile phones] on society must be fundamentally cultural‘.

MISA Zambia, 2017

The first quarter of 2017 saw the continued onslaught on media institutions and press freedom and freedom of expression generally. It was in this quarter where the media saga involving the hitherto The Post Newspaper saw its inevitable sad end. The episode, which started unravelling in a sequence of unprecedented events, in June of 2016 saw the final disposal of the case in the courts of law and the liquidators taking full control of the affairs with the view to dispose of its assets. Included in the report are a number of interesting incidences that continue to add new developments, twists and intrigues to the media operational setting in Zambia, constituting significant developments during the review period.

This book addresses the everyday lived experiences of Africans in their interaction with different kinds of media: old and new, state and private, elite and popular, global and national, material and virtual. The ongoing targeting of African audiences and users by global media companies such as CCTV, BBC, Al Jazeera and CNN as well as social networking platforms and mobile phone networks, testifies to their increasing global importance. So far, the bulk of academic research on media and communication in Africa has studied media through the lens of media-state relations, thereby adopting liberal democracy as the normative ideal and focusing on the potential contribution of African media to development and democratization. This volume contributes instead to the project of provincializing and decolonizing audience and internet studies, focusing here on the lived experiences of African audiences and users.

Research objectives: To emphasize the importance of Jāme' al-Hedāyat fī 'Elm al-Remāyat in terms of medieval Mongolian and Iranian cultural history and to contribute to the recognition of this important source in the world. Research materials: The author of the article examines Jāme' al-Hedāyat fī 'Elm al-Remāyat, the source of the research, and the current literature on the subject. Results and novelty of the research: Mongol history studies in the world are quite advanced in the light of resources and research. However, many issues waiting to be uncovered and many resources waiting to be discovered are waiting for researchers. Most studies focus on political history where sources tend to provide more information. Nevertheless, although few, cultural sources written during the Mongolian states have survived to the present day. One of these sources is Jāme' al-Hedāyat fī 'Elm al-Remāyat, written in Iran during the Ilkhanid period. It is an important treatise on archery history. The treatise was written in Persian. Although this source is a very rare source from the medieval Iranian period, it is not well known among researchers. The novelty of this study is to introduce Jāme' al-Hedāyat fī 'Elm al-Remāyat, an important cultural source of Mongolian and Iranian history, to the scholarly world and to identify the studies on this source.