also, wanted to let folks know i’ve posted my fair trade in music talk i gave in south africa at the moshito music conference on my blog (http://soungalo.blogspot.com) permalink for my whole talk:
http://soungalo.blogspot.com/2007/01/fair-trade-in-music.html

permalink for my notes on fair trade:
http://soungalo.blogspot.com/2007/01/detailed-notes-on-fair-trade-music.html

there is also a convo about the tune your world campaign on calabash’s blog. permalink for that discussion:
http://calabash.typepad.com/world_music_advocate/2007/01/calabash_launch.html#comments

peace.

http://www.globalbeatfusion.com/events/vieux.html

it’s going to be a hot party…

things seem to be getting a bit hairy there at the moment rather inconveniantly interupting his digging mission but he’s managed to get a few mixes upped including one by the syliphone label

http://www.voodoofunk.blogspot.com/

great read, pics and music but the 2nd afro funk mix is the killer
mick

for the record, i am a big fan of non-exclusive contracts for paid download services! and Erich — i think the ‘artist-direct’ genre would be a nice, useful thing.

Calabash Music is an evolving model of music commerce, community networking, and artist empowerment. Technological and financial constraints along with the current level of internet access in the asymmetrically wired world are all pieces of the puzzle we contend with daily. Negotiating the stakeholder needs of artists, music fans, and staff all come into play as we work to develop audience and technology.

The existing models of fair trade in physical goods (coffee, tea, clothes, baskets, etc…) do not include the enabling of producers to take part in marketing, promotion or distribution. Generally fair trade practices do not set a percentage of return to the producer rather they are a set of guidelines for livable wages and environmental sustainability. Percentages of profit sent to the producer and actual payout is not widely available (correct me if I am wrong). Accepting imperfections in the system (maintains a global wage labor culture and usually includes long distance transportation) the guidelines are far better than the plantation economies of yesteryear. Posting our artist contract and sharing our profit structure are examples of our efforts to construct guidelines for a fairer trade music system.

Jace mentions his thoughts on “fair trade”:

SEEDS, spreading free & open-source software — ie zencart.com if we are talking about free & open ‘web-shop’ applications.

Totally with you. Giving artists tools and means to use them is key. I take this idea of “seeds” to mean operating to enable artists to promote themselves and generate income, and engaging an audience by introducing them to artists they may not otherwise know or take interest in. Calabash Music has developed with this in mind and continues to hone the tools that artists and their listeners can use to make noise on the web while connecting it to a commerce tool. This past fall we released code for our embeddable flash player allowing people to easily post music and call attention to an artist or song.
Generating ‘web-shop’ software for artists to use is important. There are and should be ways to buy direct from artists. However, given the wide verity of artist familiarity with programming and desire to maintain a retail outlet in the global sphere, Calabash offers an option that is relatively easy to set up and maintain. Our contracts with artists and labels are non-exclusive meaning that anyone on our site is free to sell anywhere else – we often encourage this. DRM free mp3s and DRM free contracts.
Ultimately, we (writers, promoters, retailers, programmers, and more) are mediating musical experience. Often introducing an artist and their music to an audience that will hopefully turn around and pay for that experience by sharing the artists with another and/or putting money down. Designing tools like the embedded album, video players, rss for artist pages, and artist blogs on those pages opens up avenues for artists to represent themselves. Without spilling the beans on future developments I’ll say that we are continuing to make the interface easier for artists to have more control over their content and more direct contact with the users.

I agree that label listing and/or a section of “artist direct” music is a step we been wanting to take and should not wait any longer on.

keep the questions coming,
Simeon

we started selling downloads before itunes did, and obviously at that time, the world was much different. offering artists a direct deal and giving them 50% was (and for the most part, still is) way way better than any other deal out there for artists. itunes will work with individual artists, maybe, sometimes, but you better have a good in there. otherwise, if you are solo, you have to go through an aggregator, which is not a bad thing, but it is not a direct feed. calabash will (and does) take content directly from artists. we always have.

i’m going to dig up and post a talk i gave in south africa at Moshito on fair-trade in music. i’ll put it up on my blog – soungalo.blogspot.com but please continue this thread over here at negrophonic. basically, the problem is this – there is no definition of fair trade in music. so anyone can call themselves fair trade. we know what fair trade in coffee is, we know what fair trade in handcrafts is, but we don’t know what fair trade in music is. but we have defined several aspects of fair-trade and applied them to calabash, without caring that no one is going to slap a nice label on us. some of those aspects involve transparency, which is why we have the artist agreements up. putting label agreements on line would be a burdensome task, since many of them have slight changes. we’d probably be happy putting up a stock agreement and saying to the labels – take it or leave it, but i don’t think they’d be happy, and ultimately this would cut our content, making our customers happy. we’re trying to please several masters here, and of course, have to make sacrifices and choices. we do hope that we can talk about these choices in public and either realize we made the right choice, or change our policies and practices and make a new better choice. as an independent, small, and listening company, we reserve the right to listen to our customers, critics, and artists and change course whenever.

in terms on content coming into calabash, you are right, the majority of content is label provided. however, we are getting more and more from artists, and working with local folks around the globe to provide us with direct connections to the best local artists, meaning we’ll have more and more GOOD global international independent content. we’ll also continue to get label/aggregated content to make our customers happy.

i’ve also been thinking about creating a “Genre” on our site specifically to feature those artists that we’ve done a direct deal with, and your posting may just push me over that edge. any ideas on what to call that genre would be appreciated . . .

ok, that’s way enough for now, but let’s keep this discussion rolling.
peace.
erich

i think perhaps it would be best to hear someone from calabash respond.

i would say, though, that while i agree with you totally about cutting out the middlemen, i do find calabash’s approach to be a move in the right direction at least for this level of brokerage (which i don’t see going anywhere, at least immediately). moreover, their anti-DRM policy is refreshing and the sheer level of variety they offer (including lots of independents) is a good alternative to the iTunes of the worldwidewebs. but, yeah, i’d like to see more about the actual deals myself, and the licensing with labels (whose own deals are anything but transparent, and often alarming) is problematic.

it helps that i’ve met a couple of the middleguys that work at calabash–one is an ethnomusicologist–and they’re nice people who mean well. erich? simeon? any thoughts?