Distributing Hip-hop in a South African town: From the Digital Backyard Studio to the Translocal Ghetto Internet

This paper describes digital distribution strategies of hip-hop artists from the black townships in a town in South Africa. It relates examples from the author's documentary film, Digital Hip-Hop Headz, to scholarly discourse. Hip-hop artists create digital MP3 recordings using secondhand computers and basic microphones. They distribute these through various offline and online platforms. Due to the constraints of mobile data costs, they avoid mainstream web 2.0 platforms. Instead, they distribute their media files on marginal 'grey' platforms such as Datafilehost. This means media circulates online with limited visibility, accessed by other remote hip-hop township communities through Facebook, so creating what I describe as a translocal 'ghetto internet'. Once downloaded, their media is distributed offline in communal spaces through services such as Bluetooth. Thus the 'ghetto Internet' is limited in its potential for inclusivity or global reach, but is translocal, in that it communally connects the periphery.