Since the work of pioneering ethnomusicologist Klaus Wachsmann in the middle of the twentieth century, not a whole lot has been written about Ugandan music. This is the first reason to read David G. Pier's book about traditional music in Uganda: to get a glimpse of a musical world that is conventionally overlooked. Second, Ugandan Music in the Marketing Era is a compelling case study of how musical practices considered ‘traditional’ are interlaced with very modern lives, with personal and collective aspirations, and with global marketing culture.

The book follows the music competition Senator National Cultural Extravaganza, a travelling music competition aiming to attach the brand of Senator Beer to culture, thereby winning the sponsoring brewery market shares in rural Uganda. It begins at the corporate headquarters in Kampala, as Pier explores the meanings and imaginaries of the marketers who commissioned the project. Here we also meet the two main protagonists of the book, the cultural brokers Alibatya and Kintu, who are traditional musicians and event managers of the music competition. The negotiations between the marketers and the cultural brokers about how to attach the brand to traditional Ugandan music culture anticipate the analysis of the strategies and practices of music professionals, marketers and community dance groups presented in the following chapters. The local concept of ‘promotion’ (okutumbula in Luganda) here becomes the analytical starting point for investigating the ways in which actors with divergent interests collaborate in modern marketing projects. Looking at okutumbula as a particular way of understanding and practising social relationships, what may at first glance appear to be a project of global marketing culture takes on a highly localized and specific historical form, as traditional music becomes the means and arena for promoting a brand. David Pier examines how this takes place in the social interactions in planning and design meetings, in the dramaturgy of the events held in trading centres across the country, within the social organization of the competing groups, and in the music and dance they perform at the Extravaganza. In the central ethnomusicological chapter of the book, Pier presents the songs of one of the participating groups (with a link to online audio recordings). The curious musical phenomenon of interlocking stands out as a crystallization of indigenous ways of understanding promotion as an aspect of everyday social practice. With great insight, Pier shows how these musical practices are a ‘socially binding force’ while simultaneously ‘stretching social bonds to the breaking point’. In 2013, the collaboration between the two cultural brokers and the Senator brand ended, and the last chapter of the book examines the strategies and livelihoods of the two event managers after the Extravaganza, as they attempt to navigate the world of international aid in the promotion of culture in the global South. Considering various ‘modes’ of promotion that were in tension in the Senator Extravaganza, Pier demonstrates that, in the marketing era of contemporary Uganda, promotion has become a ‘mode of political activism without predetermined content’. For cultural practitioners, the act of promotion itself becomes just as – or more – important as the messages being promoted in marketing projects.

A central aim of the book is to show the specific ways in which marketing is being culturally articulated within the conditions of neoliberal globalization in Africa. Here, the analytical potential of okutumbula goes very far, as indigenous ways of conceiving and brokering relationships between persons, states and markets. But perhaps it does not go far enough, as an insistence on following local ideas about promotion and markets may have led to a more delicate treatment of ‘the neoliberal’, which in the book appears as a general context, a new social ontology – as opposed to a traditional social ontology – an agent of change, and an explanation of all of these various phenomena.

Ugandan Music in the Marketing Era is an important contribution to a tradition of scholarship that takes popular music as a prism through which to study social change. David G. Pier's ethnography of traditional music presents a fascinating case from Uganda that offers important insights into transformations of everyday life in the marketing era. The book will be of great value for readers with an interest in the relationship between popular culture, politics and the market, as Pier's careful analysis of traditional music pinpoints the branded arena with its changing forms of political agency and entwining values of traditional culture and consumer power in rural Uganda.