Christopher Kirkley has a fascinating site called Sahelsounds dealing with music in Saharan Africa. The about page describes his work as examining:

“contemporary popular musics in an evolving technological landscape from the interplay of localized traditions with transglobal influences to new media models of cultural transmission.”

He has a record label, and one of the albums consists of music collected from memory cards in the Saharan desert. He highlights a really interesting parallel with what I’ve seen recently in PNG, where people share files via bluetooth or swapping memory cards. Many of the songs so shared and distributed aren’t necessarily released commercially, and unless you know the area and people, it can be tricky to track down the details.

Although smartphones don’t appear to be particularly significant in this area yet (only (!) about 10% of the 445 million according to this article) the potential for music production on such devices is pretty obvious. I love this clip pointed by Christopher’s blog, for example: