African Music Creators: Turning Cultural Strength into Sustainable Livelihoods

African music creators face many of the same challenges as creators around the world: streaming, AI, collecting societies, managers and the fair share between producers and artists. But these issues can be more sensitive in Africa because the overall context is often less favourable to proper regulation being put into place.

For Wally Badarou, President of the African Music Academy (AMA), addressing these challenges requires stronger Pan-African cooperation and a recognition of the role that culture can play in Africa’s future.

“We want to foster that idea that the more we work together, the better it is for every one of us,” he says. For AMA, this is why working hand in hand with the African Union is so important.

AMA is currently looking to engage with the African Union around three key areas. The first is a call for authors’ rights to be recognised through UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage framework. The second is the development of a legal framework or code of good practice that could help collecting societies across Africa operate more effectively. The third is the mobility of African artists and their equipment, with the aim of exploring whether some form of cultural pass could make it easier for artists to travel throughout Africa.

These priorities reflect challenges that can have very practical consequences for creators. Badarou points to the situation of collecting societies in Africa and the need for systems that are more efficient and capable of ensuring that creators receive the revenues they are entitled to. As he explains, African artists can miss significant revenue from outside their own countries when legal and collective management systems are not properly enforced.

The relationship between AMA and CIAM is also an important part of this work. As a CIAM partner alliance, AMA can represent the interests of creators in conversations with governments, the media, collecting societies and the wider music industry. Badarou describes this connection as giving AMA a form of legitimacy and a global perspective, while allowing it to compare its work with what other CIAM partner alliances are doing in different regions.

Ultimately, however, Badarou believes the conversation needs to go beyond individual rights and systems. “African culture, starting with African music, is probably one of Africa’s biggest contributions to civilization,” he says. In his view, stronger legal and economic frameworks could allow African creators to thrive, live from their work and contribute even more to their communities and to the wider world.

“It’s just about time that they can make a living out of it.”