Huge losses in revenue to pirates have goaded the music industry into constructive action, reports Glynis O’Hara
IN China, eight people were executed last year for music piracy. “Just like that,” says Mike Snow, drawing a line across his throat with his finger.
The trouble is, they weren’t the big guys. And, according to overseas reports, the factories which supplied those executed with their stock remained untouched and productive.
The South African music industry does not favour such drastic action, Snow adds, but China’s approach shows the extent of the piracy problem and governments’ failure to deal with it. Many governments collude in what can be a highly lucrative industry; others, such as Mozambique, Swaziland and Botswana, don’t even have laws governing copyright.
Music piracy – illegal recording, whether it’s done on the home hi-fi or in specialised factories – poses a major threat to the music industry worldwide. In the United States, revenue losses blamed on piracy run into billions of dollars.
In South Africa, however, the threat is close to lethal: current estimates suggest one-fifth of the industry’s projected sales is lost to pirates – illicit takings worth around R150-million a year.
Such losses prompted the Associated South African Music Industry (Asami) to contract Snow – a former soldier in the British army – to lead its crackdown on the pirate business. He came to South Africa eight years ago, working initially for a private security company which worked with the World Wildlife Foundation against rhino and ivory smuggling. He then moved into the theft and smuggling of intellectual property arena, which brought him into contact, and then to a contract, with Asami.
Snow says South Africa’s burgeoning counterfeit CD business owes much of its growth to Bulgarian criminals – a group already carving itself a niche in South African car theft syndicates.
Bulgaria’s piracy industry produces near- perfect CD duplicates, capturing an estimated 4,5% – $1,8-billion – of global CD sales. Only last week the European Union demand-ed the Bulgarian government stamp out this thriving business. Its efforts so far have failed.
And while previously most of Bulgaria’s pirated CDs were sold on the streets of Eastern Europe and Russia, Africa is also now proving a willing market.
The CDs are brought in by individuals, or in crates. An individual smuggler was recently caught with 1000 such CDs as he flew into South Africa.
“It’s organised crime stuff, it’s like printing money for them,” Snow says. “The CDs cost R40 and they sell them to everyone – at the law courts, at police stations, to reporters, everyone.”
Many of the pirated cassettes in South Africa, meanwhile, come from Dubai. Snow suspects Dubai is home to a large duplicating factory run by a company called Thomsun Original. “Someone in this country is taking all the local releases to Dubai, including those from the smallest independent companies, to have pirate versions made. I’d like to catch that person,” Snow says.
Once manufactured in Dubai, the cassettes are shipped to Maputo and brought over the border in boxes and suitcases. The pirated cassettes are either of local black or of international music artists – local white music simply isn’t worth bothering about, it would seem. “It’s a bit of an insult, really,” Snow adds.
But such choosiness could also partly be because pirates “usually operate where there’s a captive audience, such as in mine complexes, in underprivileged and illiterate communities, where people often don’t even know what a genuine cassette looks like”.
Simple piracy involves copied cassettes with cheap, photocopied inlays – these sell for around R15 and cost the pirate about R5 to produce. A group called Zamalek seems to be the flavour of the month, with pirate Zamalek cassettes everywhere. Lucky Dube has been a target as well, with one duplicate so extensively redesigned that the cover picture turned Dube into a white, reggae-playing backpacker.
Dubai’s counterfeit tapes, however, look like the genuine article. They’re cellophane wrapped and impressive-looking, and only people in the industry can spot them by checking the packaging details. The duplicates mostly sell for around R25, and as the real thing sells for R25 to R30, they don’t offer that much price advantage.
In all such illegal recording, it is the artist who suffers, and that is the industry’s main problem. Alongside the buying public’s long-time common home- recording habits, most consumers probably don’t care where a tape comes from or what it looks like, provided it’s cheap and audible.
Part of Asami’s strategy has been a trial strategy to woo the hawkers, who sell mostly products in the simple piracy category, explain the problems to them, give them a starter pack of 50 to 80 titles and introduce them to genuine suppliers who can sell them the cassettes at competitive rates. Asami says it has had a lot of success with the approach, which produces an army of anti-piracy agents as a by- product.
Another approach has been to help train officials from Customs and Excise to detect pirated material as it comes across the border.
Asami says thousands of items were seized last year following these efforts. The industry is also negotiating with the likes of Mozambique to persuade them to enact copyright legislation.
How successful has Asami’s campaign been? “It’s difficult to quantify,” Snow says. “Asami is doing what it can. If they can’t stop it altogether in the United Kindom and the US, how the hell are we going to do it with millions of people in the informal sector here?”
Asami anti-piracy committee chairman Harry Voerman adds: “It’s like chipping away at an oak tree with a pen-knife. But it absolutely has to be done.”