Since the beginning of the 21st century, the digitalization of music has led to intense transformations of music production, diffusion and consumption worldwide. The repercussions of these technological changes vary widely over contexts, as do music’s meanings and roles. In many African semi-authoritarian regimes, for instance, music has long represented a crucial site of “politics from below” through which popular classes interpret state politics, national ideologies and messaging, while expressing veiled or coded critique (Askew 2002; White 2008). Building on emerging discussions about the uneven development of digital technologies and on my long-term observation of trends at play in Central African societies, this project investigates how the social interactions, practices and mediations created around the digitalization of popular music reconfigures the participation of popular classes in politics, public life and dynamics of power in these societies. I ask the following interrelated research questions, which address three dimensions of power as expressed through music digitalization in Central African cities: 1. Entrepreneurial economies: How does the digitalization of music worlds shape new entrepreneurial economies and transform mechanisms of social reproduction, status and prestige in these societies? 2. Sociality and everyday politics: How do digital activities participate in the production of everyday sociality and micropolitics, through which citizens incorporate, reconfigure or emancipate themselves from power dynamics? 3. Religion and the occult: what agency is given to digital music tools in power relationships played out in the intermingled domains of religion, the occult and ancestrality? In raising these questions, I build on scholarship that has demonstrated how consent, domination and political participation operate not only through political parties, bureaucratic institutions and military repression, but also through ordinary relationships, sociality, body techniques and materialities (Foucault 1992; Warnier 2007). Drawing on interdisciplinary research on politics and power in Central African societies, viewed through the lens of the anthropology of music, my research questions have been formulated to address three blind spots in the literature: (1) the lack of research on the role of digital technologies and economic entrepreneurship in shaping relationships between popular culture and power in African states; (2) the need for more ethnographic knowledge about popular classes’ participation in politics and public life through the production and consumption of digitized music; and (3) the neglect of the religious and symbolic dimensions of music digitalization’s impact on power. To explore these issues, my team will draw on ethnographic studies of music production and reception in four cities in Cameroon, Gabon and the Republic of Congo. The case studies have been selected to produce empirical insights in direct response to our research questions, focusing on such new phenomena induced by digitalization as emerging forms of entrepreneurship, popular use of audio-visual technologies, virality and increasing commodification. Researchers will draw on both traditional anthropological methods such as participant observation and innovative methods such as reception studies and ethnographic filmmaking. Interrogating emerging cultural forms through innovative mixed methods, the research will illuminate how music artists, intermediaries and consumers reconfigure existing practices of power related to resources, sociality and the occult, and how this reconfiguration is itself challenging or conforming to the (local and global) systems of exploitation and domination that underlie Central African societies. Our results will be disseminated through two ethnographic films, two organized conferences, (at minimum) three academic papers, two ethnographies, one Ph.D. dissertation and one special journal issue.