Depending on where you are in the world, life after the death of physical music looks very different. In West Africa, the post-CD landscape was populated by market stalls selling SIM and micro-SD cards preloaded with tracks. Eventually, pals started sharing songs directly by Bluetooth, phone to phone. After WhatsApp began to spread in the 2010s, you didn’t have to be in physical proximity to send your buddies the bangers. It wasn’t links being shared, though, but highly compressed MP3s, which stood a better chance of getting to their destination. To this day, music sharing is contingent on what is realistic within the constraints of the region’s relatively weak internet.
These musical backchannels made Mdou Moctar famous. A shredder from Niger who plays assouf, or Tuareg guitar music, he’s what you might call a crossover star: His 2021 album Afrique Victime was released on the…
