The Return of Live Music

After a recent very pleasant conversation with the always amiable Francis Falceto, I was fortunate to receive a CD containing all the publicity he had collected over his 20 years of promoting Ethiopian music. Amongst the many hundreds of scans and texts contained within I found a folder called ‘The Very Best of Ethiopiques’ which I immediately opened with great interest.

While other folders had many long and detailed articles relating to the Ethiopiques artists and the individual Ethiopiques releases, the folder I was browsing through contained mostly short and predicable reviews from mainstream media sources. Then I found this:

Forum Threat Title: ‘How much are the Ethiopiques Artists Getting?’
“Given that Union Square licensed the material from Buda (…) how much do you think the original artists/songwriters (or if dead, their families) are getting for their labours? (…) One option would be for Union Square to link up with Fairtrade to discuss partnership possibilities”.

The answer in the forum came not from USM but from the owner of the forum, Charlie Gillett, who replied “Hmm, I wonder what the folks at Union Square will make of this? As they are so far down the licensing line, I don’t think they have any moral responsibilities to the artists beyond paying royalties to Buda (…) Most of the artists would have recorded for session fees at best. I can’t imagine a royalty structure existing at the time.”

These are strange days for the music industry and a mainstream label like Union Square Music really took a big risk releasing an obscure project such as ‘The Very Best of Ethiopiques’, as it cannot be over emphasised how difficult times are at present with the internet and illegal downloads undermining legal trade.

Because of this, it seems that nowadays many artists are having to seek alternative business models to generate revenue. For example Radiohead left EMI to join mass concert organisers Live Nation, U2 made over $20m from the release of a 3D film their live concert in Buenos Aires, and Prince released his new album for free with a British newspaper then sold out London’s biggest concert arena 21 times. It is in this environment that we have to look at the Ethiopiques artists and ask “What did they get?”.

Well… It lead directly to the Ethiopiques headlining at Glastonbury 2008 and Womad 2009. To continuous successful solo tours for Mulatu Astatqé, Alèmayèhu Eshèté, Gétatchèw Mèkurya, and Mahmoud Ahmed. To Mulatu Astatqé releasing his first album of new material in 30 years. And finally going a good way to undoing some of the awful stereotyping done by Live Aid and firmly entrenched in public’s conciousness ever since.

As Charlie Gullitt correctly points our Union Square is “a straight forward commercial company, with no pretence of having a social agenda” so considering this, the whole affair really has to go down as quite the most remarkable experience for any ethical movement supporting the Ethiopiques artists and as such offers the yet another brave new workable business model for the changing music industry to consider.

Timjim 2009

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rainaffectedbaboonparade/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0