A kid fresh from high school walks in to the living room and announces with a beaming smile that he wants to pursue music full-time. His parents who are sitting up facing him with stunned faces feign brief delight only to replace their smiles with intense looks of worry. The parents are in Africa, Kenya to be exact and no this is not a story from my past but an appropriate example for this article.
Africans do not pay for digital content, they pay for its access. Connectivity is the digital entertainment business in Africa for now
The glum faces that announcements such as these would bring to many parents in Africa and Kenya in particular are not to be misunderstood. Why do you think that despite their fame, majority Kenyan artists in the pre-mobile phone era could not make ends meet as easily as some do today? Many pundits and commentators have been pointing fingers at what you may say is the answer, copyrights. Yet this is but a symptom, the real cause of the challenges creatives face in Kenya and Africa in general begins in the shamba. Kenya’s property allocation systems which are governed and administered by the criminal justice system are ineffective. In Africa you do not really own anything, not yet.
In August 1972 Idi Amin Dada the tyrant ruler of Uganda between 1971-1979 declared an economic war after allegedly being prodded by one Muammar Gaddafi and quickly moved to forcefully use state machinery to take property and businesses belonging to Asians in Uganda. In that year more than 80,000 Indians were expelled from Uganda. Incidentally Uganda’s backward economy is as a result of this. Most of the businesses that were given to Amin’s allies are today gone, done and dusted.
Property rights in Africa are a figment of ones imagination. Africa’s property rights allocation systems consist of family based inheritance protocols,political crony-reward schemes and capitalist market-based schemes. Capitalism is a recent phenomenon in Africa. This is the single most biggest challenge in the success of any enterprise on the continent. It will continue to be so for the next decade at least. So what of music you say?
Africans do not pay for any digital content. Look at books for instance e-books are a myth in Kenya despite the population boasting of a mobile phone for every two people in the country. And then there is music! Digital content is free in Africa by default. When any creative content/works comes in to the continent it enters a zone where any object that derives its value from a piece of paper/legal document is free. The culture of free stuff is one entrenched deep in the soul of commerce in Africa. I wonder how many radio and television stations remit annual copyright fees to the developed world in exchange for the right to play the music on air. Few I may guess.
How do you enforce copyright laws when you cannot enforce property laws? Syokimau land titles anyone? What of the Eastleigh demolitions? All 2011 events unfolding in front of the eyes of investors and members of public alike. The entertainment industry in Africa sells access and advertising. The business model that is most successful is for premium access-the Pay-tv subscriptions business.
Naspers through Multichoice Africa has made it so that we just pay for access to the latest content in music or screen plays. It is because of this weak/defunct property law system that developing nations account for the highest violations in all rights from property to human.
And thus we go back to that kid and his aspirations to be the next big star. He/she may get the fame but to get the money they will have to charge for access not for the content. Live shows is what am talking about. Incidentally the music business globally is facing the challenge of dwindling album sales and digital downloads in mp3 format. On the African continent the only source of revenue that shows promise is the ringtone and ring back tune which is based on the charge-for-access business platform.
As of 2011, 43% of the web traffic on the globe, that is 4 out of 10 pc’s online, is attribute to torrent sites working on the BitTorrent protocol. Their main fodder is music, movies and all things entertainment. Some software is thrown in the mix but let’s be honest, your average 14-year-old in Nairobi cares more about the next release of Hugh Jackman’s Reel Steel than they do of Autodesk’s AutoCad MEP 2012 suite. We are Africans we don’t pay for content, just access, go figure!
