|
|
Kenya: Live Music Picks Up As Album Sales Stall
 |
|
|||||||||
|
||||||||||
Business Daily (Nairobi)
10 January 2008
Posted to the web 10 January 2008
Mwenda Wa Micheni
The music album may not be dead yet, but clearly, it is on its deathbed-the writing on the wall clearly suggests.
Aware of this development, some artistes are investing more of their creative energies perfecting their performance skills: eventfully, live gigs may take the space that has been occupied by the music albums.
Only last October, pop music superstar Madonna caught many off guard when she left her lovely contract with Warner Bros. Records in favour of events producers Live Nation.
Locally, musicians who have perennially reported low sales are putting more efforts into gigs as a way of complementing their earnings. It is interesting to note a continued growth in the size of crowds attending live gigs.
At the Alliance Française where there are monthly music concerts, crowds have been growing steadily. Artists like Eric Wainaina, Abbi Nyinza whose first album Mudunia-though hailed as one of the best sounds to come out of the local market- has not managed to sell many copies in two years, Juma Tutu, Uyoga and even finalists of the Spotlight on Kenyan Music have entertained several hundreds of ticket paying music fans at the garden.
Ironically, these artists have not had the same fate with their albums- despite the fact that the difference between a ticket for one gig and the album is about two hundred shillings only.
Within the city, there are several bars and restaurants that have come up in the last three years and there are live bands playing somewhere everyday of the week.
In the more affluent category are the likes of Casablanca, Club Afrique, Carnivore and even The Stanley. Restaurants in the Eastlands section of the city- considered less affluent- spend a lot of money advertising when they are hosting live music.
"Many of our clients come here to listen to music as they while away their evenings," says the manager of Umoja-based Egesa Restaurant.
Tabu Osusa, who is a producer at the Katebul, insists that the future of music is in live performance. According to the man who was featured in Kalapapla released bout three years ago and other music albums of the eighties, anyone who cannot perform has no future in the industry.
While it remains a big deal for musicians to make Sh20,000 per month from CD sales and royalties, one gig can rake in at least Sh15,000. Most of the artistes have an asking price of between 50,000 and 80,000.
In the west, reporter John Blossom for Shore.com, says, music publishers have been squirming desperately to keep consumers from dropping their habit of purchasing copyrighted content from them with lawsuits, DRM and any other types of mechanism they can manage, but sadly they have been unable to overcome the key factor in today's media: distribution is (slowly getting) dead and relationships in the right venues rule.
So alarming, those averse to this development will argue, but doesn't this hold more grain of truth than falsehood?
In the same report, Blossoms who is a content and media business expert picks the case of the Rolling Stones tour in August, which raked in a record Sh30 billion plus.
After that successful tour, the rock stars taught everyone in the music industry that they do not need allegiances to plastic disk distributors to reach people who love them; all they need is their talents and satisfying their fans.
"We are seeing artists whose primary value comes to life in venues in which they can develop relationships with audiences discovering that music publishers are failing to help them build those relationships effectively in an era of Web-based content distribution."
As the web takes its toll on the music industry, there clearly is a lot to cheer about.
"As individuals, we have little ability to discover new content because the industry has already decided what is going to be a hit," says Andreas Weigend, the German-born chief strategist at MusicStrands, a music discovery and search engine.
"However, thanks to the digital era, the record companies are losing control, and it is moving onto the street." This is not necessarily a bad thing as Weigend explains. "In the past, money in this industry went to the big record labels, which were able to determine what was - and was not - a success. In the future, the business will be in the hands of those who provide the ability to discover content."
Besides downloading, the internet is also changing the way music is marketed throughout the world. Artistes like Eric Wainaina, Kaz Lucas and even Zippy Okoth use Facebook and other social networking sites to announce their gigs. Their music is also available online for sampling. This way, they are growing their fan base.
By 2010, 25 per cent of all digital music sales will come from recommendations exchanged online by friends and acquaintances that are using such software as MusicStrands, according to a study by Gartner, Inc. and the Berkman Centre for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.
|
Sharing musical tastes with other people has already become the driving force of the online music industry, and it is democratising the culture, notes the study.
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Copyright © 2008 Business Daily. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections -- or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Make allAfrica.com your home page | RSS Feed | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Top | Site Guide | Who We Are | Advertising | Search | Subscribe | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Questions or Comments? Contact us. Read our Privacy Statement. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
