From BBC. Story by Gabriella Mulligan.

African musicians are managing to make a living from their art thanks to the Internet and the widespread adoption of mobile phones. Digital technology has given music the freedom to roam beyond borders — within Africa and beyond.

A number of home-grown online music platforms have sprung up to champion local talent and take on the might of YouTube, iTunes and SoundCloud. And they’re proving popular.

South Africa’s Bozza is one such platform spearheading the idea of a do-it-yourself music industry on the continent.

East African Mdundo, another music marketplace, empowers artists who upload their own content to the platform. Fans can listen to it or download it for free.

Based in Cape Town, radio streaming service Recast thinks radio can also play a central role in helping local artists reach a global audience.

Simon Dyson, a head of digital music at U.K.-based media consultancy Ovum, believes the home-grown nature of such platforms gives them an edge over existing western competitors.

“International services won’t be able to have offices and music curators in all of the countries they operate in and so won’t be able to boast detailed local music knowledge,” he says.

One crucial role of online music services is their potential to crush piracy, says Mdundo boss Martin Nielsen.

Providing consumers with official, free methods to access content online is key to protecting the music industry in Africa, he said, and has the potential to compete with the illegal market.

“Most Africans download music from illegal websites, not because they are pirates as such, but because they can’t access the music anywhere else,” he says. “The customer rarely knows that it is an illegal site and that legal sites exist. Mdundo is currently playing a big part in changing this.”

Recast enables consumers to tune in to playlists of radio stations from all over the world, without the usual interruptions that are part of conventional radio. Users can connect their Rdio or Spotify accounts to the service.

“In the perfect world, everything that radio plays would be something you love, and you’d happen to be listening when they do. But that’s simply not the case,” says Recast founder and chief executive, Richard Oakley. “This is why radio listeners, especially younger ones, are spending more time listening to music via digital services.”

By combining radio and digital services, Oakley said the best overall music listening experience can be created. Recast can also help artists achieve global reach, he says, as consumers anywhere in the world can listen to radio content from any other country.

“I think that local radio already does a great job of promoting homegrown music. The problem has always been that that audience is limited by geographic area — where the FM transmitter broadcasts to — so expanding that through technology platforms like Recast can help spread that promotion further,” he says.

“The Internet has made the world so much smaller,” says Zimbabwean hip hop artist Blayze. “As an artist, social media and online is a huge part of what you do, and you need to have platforms like Bozza to make that easier.”

Emma Kaye, Bozza’s founder and CEO, said the platform is all about artists taking ownership of their work and engaging directly with fans, cutting out the industry’s traditional middlemen – the management companies and record labels.

“Africa is a market of both producers of music and consumers with a growing appetite for entertainment,” she says. “Bozza has therefore created a mobile-first platform that enables the myriad of micro-producers to self publish their work to communities who are wanting locally relevant content.”

Artists using Bozza get to keep about 70 percent of the revenues their music generates and retain ownership of their intellectual property rights.

More than 7,000 African artists have already listed on Bozza.

“By embracing mobility as a content delivery platform, emerging countries or continents can leapfrog developed economies, establishing a unique societal brand in a vibrant new industry,” Kaye said.

Read more at BBC.