Music in Emerging Markets Part 1

This post was originally intended for another blog, but there's no harm in duplication, hey?

I can only speak from a South African perspective, but as Raiser and Volkmann (Google it) point out, Johannesburg has a lot in common with Sao Paulo, Mumbai and Shanghai, so you could easily change it from BRIC to BRICA (Brazil, Russia, India, China, Africa).

Here goes:

Despite the increasingly global economy and the rise and rise of Web 2.0, many people in the Western world especially remain ignorant about the state of affairs in Southern Africa, often thought of as an AIDS-infected, crime-affected region with lions roaming the streets and no electricity.

Yet according to Billboard, South Africa specifically was one of only two growth markets in 2007, the other being India. Sources at Universal Music (local) report, however, that there was an 8% decrease in CD sales in 2008, and while this is significant, it is nowhere near the 23% average that CD sales have dropped in larger markets every year since 2000, without a concomitant rise in digital download sales.

A little perspective: South Africa’s music sales contribute about 1% to the globe, compared with about 36% for the musical juggernaut which is the United States. While Apartheid is long dead and gone, the historical make-up of the country can still be clearly seen in its music. SA is a juxtaposition of rich and poor, of sophisticated and urbane versus uneducated and parochial. The emerging Black middle class increasingly mirrors the formerly privileged White minority, although their tastes in music are quite different. Johannesburg is a vast city which, it is estimated, will be bigger than Los Angeles in 10 years (with the same freeway snarl-ups).

Generally, this is how the industry looks: the small English speaking populace centred in the urban areas of Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban are true rockers at heart. They form rock bands and make music that would fit comfortably in the mainstream US and UK music markets (think of SA’s biggest music exports, including Dave Matthews, Mutt Lange and Seether). The larger Afrikaans market have spawned a counter-culture all their own which has a dedicated following such that bigger Afrikaans artists can do exceptionally well from CD sales and gigs. Although this is a simplistic taxonomy, the Black market (no pun intended) can be split into two groups: the Gospel/traditional African market (think Ladysmith Black Mambazo and the Soweto Gospel Choir, both Grammy winners); and the newer Afro-Pop scene, which could be genre-fied as “world music.” Kwaito, for example, is the local equivalent of rap music, complete with upbeat drum loops and spoken word verse-chorus configurations in Zulu. The jury is still out on whether this music form is losing ground to mainstream contemporary African pop.

But Gospel is the biggest selling genre in SA, where it’s not unusual for tapes still to be sold in very small rural areas. A successful Gospel or Afro-Pop album might sell 100,000 copies, which is 5 times gold (20,000 copies in SA) or more than double platinum (40,000 copies, according to RISA, the local equivalent of the RIAA).