Digitalization and datafication have brought structural changes to the music industry globally, creating new innovation opportunities as well as risks for industry role-players, including within the artist-audience relationship. In this context, extending the research understanding of independent music production, as Walzer has suggested, is increasingly important. This paper makes a methodological contribution to this research agenda, by demonstrating the use of autoethnography in the study of a household innovation system, and the use of autoethnographic data for reflection on knowledge acquisition and knowledge combination as well as barriers to and enablers of innovation. The paper also makes a conceptual contribution to the literature on innovation capabilities within African informal settings, arguing for a conception of knowledge informality as a distinct feature of knowledge that can be combined with more formal codified knowledges during innovation processes. For public policy to orient to resource-constrained and knowledge-diverse creative communities, new sources of data and types of analysis widen and deepen the evidence-base for creative industry development broadly, and independent music production in particular.
Human Sciences Research Council (2026) studied this question.