By a few clicks, music is made and sold to fans

The digital revolution has brought about a huge transformation in the creation and promotion of creative works and the access to such works.

Music has been at the heart of these breath-taking developments in the last decade.

Globally, while the sales of recorded music have dropped substantially since 2000, the market for concert tickets and merchandise has increased.

While the Sony cassette Walkman was the gadget of choice in the 1980s, today, smaller, sleeker portable devices such as the mobile phones, iPods, MP3 players and tablets, which combine audio and video are the media of choice.

The music shops as they existed have gone out of business and closed altogether as consumers resort to downloads.

The largest music retailer in the world is digital; Apple’s iTunes Store, which was introduced in 2003.

Since the first major CD release of a music album by a Kenyan artist in 1997, migration to different digital formats has been nothing short of dramatic.

New media have stepped into the void left by the distribution networks of old.

The physical structures of record companies and record stores have been replaced by the virtual industry of downloads and digital music networks.

Kenya’s largest mobile network provider Safaricom offers MP3 music tracks and ringtone downloads on its Safaricom Live portal.

Other sites like Vuma, run by the Music Copyright Society of Kenya, are dedicated to selling Kenyan music online.

Royalty payments

A leading provider of mobile phone downloads in East Africa estimates that the business opportunity is worth $4 million a year.

A Nairobi-based firm, Cellulant, says the Government takes 26 percent in taxes per download, with the operator taking up to 60 percent and 10-12 percent is paid to artistes in royalties.

A successful artiste can attract anywhere between 200,000 and 300,000 downloads over three months.

Today, the trend-setting artistes don’t need to release their music on physical formats.

The big names in the business who are invariably rappers such as Octopizzo, P-Unit, Mejja, Juliani and many others are signed on to Mdundo, an upstart that allows the artists to sell their music through scratch cards and to keep the money generated from these sales.

The company also sells the music on its online platform from which it pays royalties to the artists.

Art has become more accessible than ever thanks to the digital transformation.

Everyday art, just like life itself is losing its materiality with photos, books, music and films now crammed onto hard drives and similar storage.

The digital era has also changed the entire concept of creating art itself, for instance, fewer musicians now invest in the skill of learning an instrument.

Advances in recording technology have allowed many producers and artists to create studios in their homes.

Ted Josiah, the music producer who steered a wave of electronic sounds in the late 1990s once explained how the dynamics of recording music had changed in the digital era: “With a good computer, having about two or three gigabytes of memory, you can produce virtually any sound you desire.”

Thanks to the popularity of digital platforms, artists are now able to market themselves directly to the consumers in innovative ways using free services like the online video sharing network, You Tube, or on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

If there was any doubt that music is the engine of the digital world then consider these facts from the 2013 report by the International Federation of Phonographic Industry.

Nine in 10 of the most watched videos of all time on You Tube are music videos, nine in 10 of the most liked people on Facebook are artistes and seven of the top 10 most followed people on Twitter are artistes.

Technology is also changing how films are made and marketed.

Independent filmmakers have found the Internet a great tool to market and reach audiences even when TV stations have been reluctant to buy these films.

Digital revolution

In the last decade, the digital revolution in filmmaking has given rise to low-cost productions in Riverwood, named after the bustling business hub of River Road in Nairobi.

Shot in two or three days and edited within a week, up to 30 films are churned out on VCDs each week - selling at not more than Sh200.

Worryingly, protection of intellectual property rights remains the single biggest challenge in the digital era when multiple copies of content can be duplicated in a short time and passed off as the original.

The story is often told of how a street hawker unknowingly approached one of the main actors of the 2012 box office hit, Nairobi Half Life with a pirated copy of the film.

The film had had a long run at the theatres last year and by the time it was officially released on DVD a few months ago, pirated copies had long made the rounds in major towns in the country.

The migration from analogue to digital broadcasting over the next one year comes with endless opportunities for creative innovators but also presents the challenge of producing quality content to serve the expected demand from the multiple television channels and audiences.