South African Music Archive Project (SAMAP)

Based in Pretoria, South Africa, South African Music Archive Project (SAMAP) is an archive that aims at creating an online resource of South African music so as to promote research in the field of popular music and culture.

Much of South Africa’s music heritage is hard to access. The recorded material is politically sensitive; some of collections were never released. This has left a large amount of local recorded music in need of identification, digitisation and research.

A number of independent music archives currently lack the infrastructure to preserve their collections. An immediate concern is the deterioration of analogue tapes, records and other obsolete media of which store much of the material. Another matter of concern is the fading memories of those musicians and other individuals involved.

Through its aim of creating an online resource of South African music, SAMAP website currently contains approximately 13 000 audio samples and associated metadata from five music collections.

The collections are: Chris Ballantine Collection, Jurgen Brauninger Collection, Hidden Years Music Archive Project (HYMAP), International Library of African Music (ILAM), UKZN Music Library (UKZN) and Shifty Records.

The use of the audio recordings in the SAMAP archive is intended for personal, research and non-commercial purposes only. Commercial use, including unauthorised reproduction, retransmission or editing or other exploitation, is strictly not allowed.