Flash Disks Killing Our Musicians

To sell 1000 copies at a single musical show, in one night and at K2000 a copy is a feat that can translate into something else. Already, this means K2m a night and this is excluding gate, plus hire collections.

Assuming that the artist is going to perform in all the 52 Saturdays in a year, he would make K104 million in sales of their music alone.

Well, forget about this figure; this can only happen in my fantasy world. But the point I am trying to drive home is, Malawian music followers are helping the industry to drown into a quagmire of retrogression.

As we speak, right now every Jack and Jill is running some rundown music with two or a single rickety computer that is leaking out musicians’ wealth of their lifetime. And now they can do so with the blessings of Copyright Society of Malawi.

For some time now, even in the face of vehement protest from musicians themselves, Cosoma has chosen to be the issuing of soft copy licences which once gotten people can upload hundreds of albums in flash disks for sale.

For you to get the music all you need is a flash disk or a mobile phone that can take in some media and some K100 and you will get all the albums that Lucius Banda, for example, has come up with over to decades that he has been in music business.

These ‘flash disk patrons’ for one thing, are always in the forefront cursing the artists for lack of innovativeness, ingenuity and progress, forgetting that for artists to achieve such, they require resources.

If we were willing as a proud country to have our musicians reach the dizzying heights, we surely were supposed to dig deep into our pockets and patronise the work of our artists so that with our buying of their products they can be fired into some ingenious mortals who will be able to give us even better material that can stand the international test.

Ever since OG. Issah, that music distributor, stopped doing something he has only known best in his life because no soul, no longer goes before his counter to buy music. People have now found a way of getting music cheaply and without regard to its maker.

One might laugh off the decision by the distributor, but one thing you might not realise is that even patronage of music through flash disks would be snuffed if materials will no longer be forthcoming.

The musicians themselves feel the pinch that is why in every music video album our musicians produce these days, they will make sure to warn against piracy.

Much as we might gloss over such warning in the conviction that there is no system in this country to track down music pirates in earnest, one thing which has to stand out clearly is the fact that we are helping in making our music industry achieve some mediocre status. 

In the past I used to scream mad at radio stations, including the mother institution the Malawi Broadcasting Corporation (MBC) which at one time equally behaved like a flash disk patron.
They would get the music through the flash disk but still fail to pay for royalties incurred because the music was being played to the public as it were.

The same was the case with entertainment joints that have our music as its heartbeat. If you remove the music it means you are getting rid of the pulsation and consequently killing it.

Owners of such places, just like owners of radio stations have realised that they can never be without music. Pity though, they have this feeling that music just comes into flash disks without deeply thinking about sleepless nights that one spent to compose the lyrics and even the accompanying instrumentation to come up with the music that brings fame to their joints.
There is something terribly wrong with a culture of getting things on a silver platter. It feels the same way as the culture of getting free lunch. It kills the spirit of discernment where you have a special place for the maker of your favourite music.

Because the moment a patron has respect for the artist who makes their favourite music, the only way to give back is when they buy – read me tight here – buying their audio compact discs or DVDs without having to let some virus infested computer empty hard earned music products into their flash disk at the expense of the maker of such music.

One other good thing is that we have our music selling at very affordable prices and there is no way anyone can claim that they can manage a music player but not the music that gives the gadget meaning for its existence. 

Piracy resurrects Ned Mapira

This week on Monday my brother, Ephraim, called me from the grounds of Hyper Store in City Centre Lilongwe. Apparently, he was in his car at the parking lot waiting for my in-law, Clara, who had gone inside for some purchases, when vendors selling different wares approached him.

What attracted him were music CDs which had my face on them and he was taken aback thinking that I have ventured into music – meaning not writing and critiquing the performances of our artists as I do over here week in week out, but the actual singing that has culminated into an album.

On close inspection, he discovered that in fact the CD indicated that it was the work of the fallen musical great Ned Mapira whose album 'Chosatha', a traditional music album, sold over 63,000 copies posthumously.

The vendor demanded K1, 500 for the CD but using his negotiation skills my brother got it down to K500.

My brother called me instantly to meet him having bought the CD. I drove to City Centre where he gave me the CD and, indeed there I was, on the cover of Ned Mapira’s pirated work.

When I reached the parking space of the Hyper Store the vendors, including those selling the pirated music, swarmed around me. My heart bled when I discovered that the extent of producing and selling pirated work has gotten worse.

Well, the first feeling was that of anger, and questions started welling up within my psyche for I thought this was the prize those in the business of piracy have decided to give me, finally, for crying out loud!

When I had taken a Ned Mapira CD, then it dawned on the vendors who I was. I was Mapira’s ghost and they all vanished, and not before snatching the CD from my hand.

It’s a pity that for a mere K500 or K1000 one can buy a single CD with Lucius Banda’s all 17-lifetime-albums. The vendors are putting all the Kuimba albums, all the lifetime toils of The Black Missionaries, in just one CD for a K500.

People have argued before against the tendency. The artists have complained loudly that piracy is killing them but those that have the powers to control it have either failed or they just don’t care.

For argument’s sake, one might say people still love Ned Mapira and, since our music marketing and distributing system is mediocre - if not  nonexistent - then those that need the music can do with the provisions created by those pirating. But what would you say about Lucius Banda or Mablacks’ music which has also been denigrated in the manner I have described above when it has well supplied distribution system?

There was a time when I asked the question on these same pages on how the dead musicians get their royalties where I looked at the big difference between doing something in Malawi and doing similar thing in the West.

There was a time that I wondered on this very page why Michael Jackson’s riches are increasingly making him posthumously richer when there is no penny to show for Malawi’s fallen reggae hero Evison Matafale.

Without bothering to look at a well-coordinated system where musicians outside can release just a mere single and hit gold and continue making more money even after they die, I want us to look at what happens to music of our dead musicians.

We still hear songs on our radios that were done by the late Robert and Arnold Fumulani, Alan Namoko, Daniel and MacDonald Kachamba, States Samangaya and the list goes on and on. Where are the royalties and how different is it when vendors are cashing on the work of the dead?

This might look as if it is the problem for the dead, but, as I faced it this week in Lilongwe, believe you me piracy is the cancer that will kill the living artist.