The Political Economy of Algorithmic Curation: Music Platforms, Cultural Capital, and Sustainability in the African Global South

Abstract

This paper develops a critical political economy account of how algorithmic curation on digital music streaming platforms is reshaping cultural production, cultural capital, and creator sustainability, defined here as income adequacy and career longevity, across three Sub-Saharan music economies between 2015 and 2025. Existing platform literature is dominated by North Atlantic case material and treats African markets, when it treats them at all, as a residual "emerging" category. African cultural studies have documented rich local scenes but has been slower to theorise the specific mechanics of algorithmic gatekeeping. Through a scoping review of 74 peer-reviewed sources and industry reports (2015 to 2025), complemented by a documentary case study of the Kenyan protest track Anguka Nayo during the 2024 #RejectTheFinanceBill mobilisations, the article makes three contributions. It proposes an extension of Bourdieu’s typology by specifying a hybrid state of cultural capital, platformised cultural capital, defined as the tacit and codifiable competence in recommender logics, metadata practices, and metrics-driven release strategy that is now a precondition of visibility. It argues that the Kenyan protest cycle exhibits a distinctive dynamic of amplified sanitisation, in which algorithmic virality expands a protest song’s reach and simultaneously decontextualises its political charge. It also identifies data sovereignty over African "sonic archives" as an under-theorised site of decolonial policy intervention. The study concludes with implications for platform governance, collective management organisations, and music education.