The Sowetan‘s Patience Bambalele deserves credit for being one of the few journalists who still conscientiously spot the stories really affecting South African music. Last week she reported ( https://www.sowetanlive.co.za/entertainment/2022-02-23-cd-printing-firm-jetline-shuts-its-doors-leaving-some-muso-in-limbo/ ) the closure, after 15 years, of Jetline Discmakers, where many independent artists and small labels have committed their music to disk.
That report produced much sneering, from the Twitterati and smart-alec announcers on radio stations such as 702. “Who uses CDS these days?” they mocked: “Only vendors sell them at the downtown taxi ranks”; “Get with the programme: everything’s digital now.”
Except it isn’t.
When, in the old days, we called somebody a moegoe, the term carried the unfortunate and unwarranted implication that the person had not emerged from backward rural ways. But when people sneer about CDs – in exactly the same way that people on 702, a while back, sneered “Who bothers with tinned food any more when you have a freezer?”– I think we have to give the term a new back-story. Now, it declares the spoiled, arrogant urbanite completely ignorant of just how much of South Africa cannot afford or rely on electricity or a digital connection – and of the fact that multiple economies (including music economies) function and flourish serving those communities.
Bambalele’s story made many valid points about how artists earn cents, often long after the event, streaming their music digitally. They earn immediate hard cash selling CDs at events. But let’s home in on her observation that it’s often artists in our genre – jazz – plus gospel and traditional musics, who are still the main customers for CD printing.
Why is this? Jazz is a relatively niched genre in sales terms, so its digital earnings are inevitably more limited than others under the current dominant, highly inequitable, streaming payment models. But gospel in South Africa is so huge that it could eat up every other genre here and still have space for more. So it can’t be just that.
But what do the audiences for jazz, gospel and traditional music have in common? They comprise predominantly Black working people living in township, peri-urban and rural areas – precisely the areas that Eskom punishes with so-called ‘load-reduction’ every day as it lies to the privileged that there is ‘currently no load-shedding’. Many fans of these musics have low or no regular income; and – like more than half of all South Africans – cannot rely on accessible, affordable digital connections.
No, you sitting quaffing your gin cocktail in Maboneng. You are not the norm, although it may look so from your limited vantage-point on that rooftop.
And yet, music flourishes without electricity and wifi. Talk to any recording engineer who works outside a metropolis and they’ll tell you about vast circulation economies of gigs and recordings. You’ll never read about them in metropolitan media. But hundreds and sometimes more people turn up to hear local heroes of TshiVenda, SeSotho or IsiZulu music, and many of them buy CDs to remember the event. The income from those sales is part of what keeps the touring circuits viable for performers and promoters. If those fans own a battery-powered CD player (remember those, city smart-ass?), they can even enjoy their music when Eskom has once more left them in the cheerless dark. The same is true for the gospel choirs and singing pastors who equally criss-cross the ‘unfashionable’ parts of the country, performing in tents or open-air grounds to big congregations. (This, of course, is the under-the-radar scene that an eventual digital hit such as Jerusalema emerged from: it’s genuinely developmental.)
Paradoxically, this ability to leverage income and business viability from the memorabilia (in this case CDs) you can sell at live events is part of what put live performance at the top of the post-digital revolution value-chain – and, as Covid limitations on live shows recede, will restore that position. It’s by no means downmarket and old-fashioned in business model terms; it’s part of the cutting edge.
There are, of course, other reasons to value a hard copy – in whatever format – of music. It represents an artist’s complete vision, including liner notes, cover art and a consciously curated sequence of sounds intended for attentive listening, rather than a disaggregated ‘track’ often used as background while the computer- or phone-user gets on with something else.
As a music writer, my CD library is my research library. There are things there that never were, and maybe never will be, online, and that’s part of what facilitates telling true stories about our music history.
More importantly, holding physical copies of music asserts a degree of independence from the hegemonic global platforms for both music-makers and music listeners. As CD printers close down, music-makers will be increasingly herded towards the digital platforms, where we know they will make minimal money. And you out there, music listeners, have you considered what could happen if a mega streaming platform – let’s call it Plotify – ate up its rivals and then decided that in order to drive audiences towards the music from which it makes the most profit, it would pull all the ‘marginal’ stuff from its Cloud?
You’d have nothing left but your memories, and they’d fade fast under an onslaught of nudges towards what the platform wants you to hear.
That’s why we should be concerned when a CD printer closes in a country like South Africa. The renaissance of vinyl proves that music consumers have some power to push back, but that’s been a small, largely elite revolution. CD printers serve an important function for many music-makers and audiences central to preserving indigenous culture. If DSAC isn’t watching (as it almost certainly isn’t), perhaps DTI could take an interest in this aspect of keeping local music alive?
sisgwenjazz 