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/ARTS WEEKLY/CULTURE: Website Helps World Find World Music

Gabriel Packard

New York, Feb 4 2004 (IPS) - Even when Sevara Nazarkhan toured with rock legend Peter Gabriel it was difficult for people who liked her music to find a place to buy it.

But now her fans can log on to a new world-music website to download the songs of the ‘Britney Spears of Uzbekistani music’, along with the tunes of 500 other artists.

Calling itself the planet’s “first fair-trade music website”, CalabashMusic.com delivers world music to the world, at the same time giving the performers who make that music the chance to share and sell it without a record deal or even a CD.

The site allows visitors to download songs from a growing roster of artists from 50 countries for 0.99 U.S. dollars each, and then splits this money equally with the artists, who are also free to sell the same songs through other sites.

Nazarkhan says about 200 listeners have downloaded her material from the site, and many of them have also emailed her. “As Calabash and myself are getting bigger, there will probably be significant numbers over there,” she added.

CEO and founder Brad Powell says the number of Calabash artists is constantly growing. “(In February) we’re going to add about 600 to 800 new artists – that’s 6,000 to 8,000 new tracks,” he says in an interview.

Before he or she is added to the Calabash roster (which now numbers 500-plus artists) each potential performer is screened by an expert in that particular music.

These experts also keep Calabash abreast of new talent and of upcoming radio play lists, so that the latest songs on the airwaves will be available for listeners to buy.

Other music-download and file-sharing sites are springing up almost weekly. Most recently, Coca-Cola launched CokeMusic.com. Apple computers’ iTunes remains the market leader, selling 25 million songs for 0.99 dollars each in the past nine months.

Free sites include Kazaa, which lets users share songs with each other for free, and has also introduced a pay site.

Most sites of both kinds offer world music. But Calabash is the only one devoted entirely to world music, says Powell.

“It was the most amazing thing at the World Music Exposition,” he says. “There were 2,000 or 3,000 delegates there, and I was the (only) one there doing what I do”.

By taking on little-known artists, and by giving 50 percent of sales to the artist or record label, Calabash has left its profit margins so slim that some observers fear the website will not be able to support itself.

“Calabash has a nice philosophy of sharing the wealth with partners and artists; I just worry that they’re being very generous and they’ll go bankrupt,” says Cliff Furnald, founding editor of ‘Roots World’, an online world music magazine that, incidentally, is considering a partnership with Calabash.

Powell, who started the website in 2000 and has spent about 150,000 dollars of his own money on it, is not worried, however. He says he expects the business to be profitable by January 2005.

World musicians have been using Internet downloads to sell, share and promote their music for some years.

“I have a website where you can download one song for free and buy our CD,” says Sylvain Leroux, whose Fula Flute Ensemble plays traditional and original west African music.

Leroux thinks that fans downloading music is good for world musicians. “It bypasses the distribution systems, so it opens the market up to more people. All you need is a website, good music, and UPS”, he told IPS.

Cameroonian musician Francis Mbappe also thinks that music downloads give musicians more independence.

“The money of the music industry is no longer reserved for big music companies,” he says in an interview. “People like us – young artists – can sell our own music. We can have more control”.

Record labels, on the other hand, argue that downloading music without paying is illegal, and that the practice returns no money to the artist or record label that produced and promoted the music.

Downloading music does tend to harm mainstream artists, through lost sales. But it of ten helps independent artists and those with fewer sales, which includes most world musicians, by increasing their audience.

As people have downloaded more songs, mostly without paying, CD sales have declined, and the revenue from pay sites such as iTunes and Napster2.0 has not bridged this gap.

Calabash is not just about downloading music. It creates and runs retail websites for a range of partners including Afropop, LinkTV and the world-music promotion company Rock Paper Scissors.

Currently Calabash is working on a deal with LinkTV and Sony’s World Event Village (WEV), a web-based music site that sends film crews around the world to record live local music, which is shown on the site.

The deal would give WEV online streaming rights, LinkTV the television broadcast rights and Calabash the rights to sell the music.

Many industry experts think that because it is now so easy to download music for free via the Internet, the whole culture of buying pre-recorded CDs will soon be a thing of the past.

But the record industry is fighting back. Last week the major record labels issued another wave of lawsuits against people who allegedly uploaded music for others to download.

Furnald says the industry exaggerates the harmful effects of downloading music to protect its own interests. He also predicts that it will not be around to complain for much longer.

“The record industry has had its 100 years in the twentieth century, just like court music had 200 years in the seventeenth and eighteenth century,” says Furnald. “Like all dinosaurs,” he adds, “the recording industry as we know it will become extinct”..