A digital solution to the music marketing problem

For Kenya’s recording artistes, finding a producer is not the hardest task. It is distributing the music once it is released.

And faced with a brigade of hard core pirates, many musicians rarely reap the fruit of their hard work. Other people do.

The music copyright watchdog MCSK has not been successful in taming the runaway piracy and few musicians end up with any royalties worth singing about.

Then enter the internet age and the musicians’ troubles doubled. Through illegal music downloads and sharing, the most popular artistes are not realising the benefits of the boon.

Now local entrepreneurs, perhaps borrowing a leaf from Apple’s iTunes Store, are making sale of music easier and legal. And now your favourite Kenyan song is just a click away. No more hassles of going from music shop to music shop looking for your favourite songs.

The latest entrant into the business of online music sales is pewahewa.com and the beauty of it is one can buy music through the phone.

All you need is an M-Pesa or Zap account and you will have MP3, an audio-specific format that enables the transfer and playback of music on digital audio players on your computer and very soon, if the man behind the enterprise is to be believed, on your phone.

David Kuria says Kenyan artistes whose music is popular all over the country have no money to show for it.

“That (realisation) frustrated me because these people work very hard and they need to be rewarded,” he told Lifestyle.

The businessman says by establishing www.pewahewa.com he was responding to the rising need for clear distribution channels.

“At first, we opened up music stores and went across the country selling music but this proved hard and expensive and we had to rest it,” he says.

Then he visited amazon.com where he says he found music by the likes of Les Wanyika and Jemimah Thiong’o on sale but only in MP3 format.

“With the success of iTunes, I figured such an idea would fly in Kenya,” he says.

Pewahewa, which is Sheng for “get music”, is not the first online music sales initiative. There was mymusic.co.ke by Fakii Liwali, which seemed promising but closed down.

There are still others and artistes are grateful for not shouldering the burden of distributing their music. With online sales, they are assured of some income and someone else hassles to sell their songs.

The local online sale platforms borrow heavily from iTunes Store, from which users can buy and download songs for use on a limited number of computers and an unlimited number of iPods.

When they started out, iTunes were selling a song for $0.99 (Sh76) although there are expectations the price with rise to $1.29 (Sh99) for newer songs while older songs will be cheaper. Movies, television shows, music videos, podcasts and video games have been added to the extensive iTunes Store’s catalogue.

About a month ago, Apple announced that more than 10 billion tracks had been downloaded from the iTunes store since the service was launched on April 28, 2003, making it the largest online music store in the world.

At pewahewa.com, a song goes for Sh30 although, due to conditions set by the mobile companies that offer M-Pesa and Zap, they are forced to sell four songs at a go.

“You cannot send Sh30 through M-Pesa with the minimum amount being Sh100 and so we are forced to sell four songs per purchase for Sh120 until the companies review that rule,” Kuria says.

Pewahewa only stocks music from the Music Copyright Society of Kenya (MCSK) although Kuria says they are open to music by artistes not signed to the society.

To buy from pewahewa.com, log on to www.pewahewa.com, click on Pick, Pay and Play where you select a song, get a 30-second preview, put it in your shopping cart, open an account to authenticate the sale, choose your pay option after which you get a download link and get your MP3.

“It is an easy and safe way to buy music and we have a support team on hand to help. We want to be as transparent as possible to make everyone’s experience a joyful one,” Kuria adds.

They are working on a mobile phone (WAP) application where people can buy and store music on their phones instead of computers. Saying that this will help combat music piracy, Kuria understands that piracy remains a big issue because of online sharing.

Troubling reality

“We have tried to ensure that one cannot abuse our site by sharing the downloading link with other people. Once you have your song, the account expires and if you haven’t downloaded, we give you three attempts after which the link expires,” he says.

“The problem is, once you have the song on your laptop, you can forward it to friends and that is a troubling reality.”

He is however hopeful that the pricing of the songs will make it affordable, which is what pirates exploit.

At the moment, pewahewa is holding talks with Ugandan artistes to bring them on board.

“We are also in talks with some international distributers to sell some of the big artistes’ music on the site and this will give it an international appeal,” he says.

He says he is happy with the interest by Kenyans to buy music online.

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