Platformed Invisibility: Algorithmic Discrimination and the Sustainability of African Music - A Scoping Review

Abstract

Music streaming platforms and short video services have become dominant intermediaries in the global circulation of African music, yet mounting evidence suggests they simultaneously reproduce structural disadvantages for African artists, genres, and audiences. This scoping review synthesises the interdisciplinary literature on how algorithmic systems, revenue models, and data governance regimes produce what we conceptualise as platformed invisibility: the systematic, opaque, and technologically mediated marginalisation of non-Western cultural expression on ostensibly universal digital infrastructures. Following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) and Joanna Briggs Institute methodology, we searched seven bibliographic databases, targeted grey literature, and hand searched six leading journals for records published between January 2015 and June 2026. A total of 1,033 records were screened; 41 met inclusion criteria and were charted using an a priori extraction form. Narrative synthesis identifies four interlocking mechanisms, namely construct, method and item bias, algorithmic opacity, popularity feedback loops, and demographic and geographic skew, that operate within a political economy of data extractivism and infrastructural dependency. Countervailing interventions cluster around trustworthy artificial intelligence, data sovereignty, intellectual property reform, culturally grounded datasets, decolonial pedagogy, and Afrofuturist design imaginaries. The review advances three contributions: a conceptual definition of platformed invisibility that distinguishes it from adjacent constructs; a mapping of the mechanisms to interventions terrain; and a research agenda for empirical audits of African music on major streaming platforms. Findings underscore that algorithmic fairness for African music cannot be achieved through platform tweaks alone but requires structural decolonisation of technology, economy, and epistemology.