The Bob Dylan of Zimbabwe?

-- by William Bulkeley, Wall Street Journal

The Eric Clapton of Mali? The Britney Spears of Uzbekistan? You can't find much of them on iTunes, but now their catalogs are available for downloading, at 99 cents a song, on linktvstore.org, an Arlington, Mass., site that features world music.

Brad Powell, the chief executive, says he designed the site to give musicians around the world a chance to spread their sounds. Unlike iTunes, Link TV doesn't deal with major labels and its policy is to pay artists half the income from each download, which he says is substantially more than the normal royalty of 12% or less. "For an artist from Mali or Salvador, Brazil, if you get $500 a month, it's a huge boon to your family economy," he says. The site, which went live early this year and now carries thousands of tunes, doesn't disclose its sales. It has partnership deals and sells downloads through web sites of world-music venues such as Link-TV's show, AfroPop, and some syndicated radio shows.

Featured musicians vary from Thomas Mapfumo, [in photo at top] a political agitator from Zimbabwe who now lives in Oregon, to Chango Spasiuk, an Argentine accordion virtuoso. The most popular artist on the site? Habib Koite. "He's one of the finest guitarists in Mali, and that's saying a lot," Mr. Powell says.