Ghanaian and African music, arranged by what it did rather than what it sold. Every record here changed something — a genre, an argument, or who was allowed to be heard.
Fifty live stations, and Ananse's own bulletin read aloud, now have a page of their own.
This is a library, not a jukebox. Streaming commercial recordings requires licensing agreements worth millions — there is no small-publisher version of that, and anyone offering you one is offering you a lawsuit.
On a phone, the music stops when you leave the browser. That is the same reason. A record here plays through the platform’s own player, and that player pauses itself the moment the page is hidden — on top of which iOS closes the sound of any backgrounded tab. Background play is a paid feature of those platforms’ own apps, and their terms forbid a site like this reproducing it. What Ananse does instead is remember the exact second you were on, and carry on from there when you come back.
So Ananse does what music publications have always done:
Some early recordings on this list are approaching or already in the public domain in Ghana. Those we can host outright, and will.
It was asked for, and the answer turned out to be in YouTube's own rules rather than in copyright law. A mixer needs two decks running at once and a crossfader sitting over them. YouTube's required minimum functionality says a page must not have more than one YouTube player automatically playing at the same time, that you must not make changes to the player beyond what the API documents, and that you must not place overlays in front of any part of it — including the controls. There is no version of a two-deck mixer that survives all three.
So the mixing moved somewhere it is genuinely ours. The Make studio now synthesises a short bed from your own words — oscillators and shaped noise over a West African 12/8 bell pattern, nothing sampled — and hands you the WAV. No clearance question, because there is nothing to clear.