This month👇 

➡️Editorial
🔸Music Used to Train AI, After Ruth Koleva’s Claim
🔸Mapamundi Música sync catalogue

➡️In Depth with Ian Brennan

➡️Talk with Ola Kovalevska – Urban Lys

➡️Brief news from the media, charts and sister projects

➡️ Open calls and professional events:
🔸Babel Music XP
🔸PIN Conference
🔸Afro Pepites

➡️Meet me at ✈️

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Special format:
This issue is closer to a magazine than to a standard newsletter. So…

download the PDF version here.

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Hello, how are you? I hope you’re doing well. This month I managed to finish the newsletter earlier than the previous month, even though it is one of the longest ones. I have two extremely interesting interviews, so once again I am giving voice to other professionals. My proposal remains open: anyone who has something interesting to share, taking into account the profile of the community I address, is welcome to contact me and we can talk about it. Remember: if your work is artistic, visit www.mundofonias.com. If you produce records, visit www.transglobalwmc.com.

The image accompanying these words today was taken at Ethno Port in Poznań, Poland, with three members of Vigüela and our guide at the festival, Zuzanna, a very young and highly competent professional who helped make our presence there very smooth. Vigüela took part in the opening press conference, a concert, a workshop and a podcast in which I had the pleasure of contributing some ideas in response to the very interesting questions asked by Łukasz Smoluch.

This was my fifth time at this festival, and I can only reaffirm that it is a very enjoyable event, with an excellent programme in terms of both quality and variety. The band had an amazing time too.

I wanted to highlight two topics here.

1️⃣ Music Used to Train AI, After Ruth Koleva’s Claim

Yesterday, when I woke up, this video by Ruth Koleva appeared on my Instagram:

She explains that she has found out that 79 of her songs and one video have, in her words, been used illegally to train AI models. After seeing this, I checked and found that two videos from my own YouTube channel were also being used.

Ruth is calling for regulation from the European Union. She says that she has spent hundreds of thousands of euros and devoted her physical and mental health to these productions, only for it now to be used by people who know nothing about music and have invested nothing, so that they can make music simply by writing a prompt.

I fully sympathise with Ruth, who is absolutely right. Where is all this heading? Honestly, I do not know. I think we are going to face many more conversations about this.

2️⃣ Mapamundi Música sync catalogue 

This week I have been taking part as a student in a training programme organised by UFI, with professionals from record labels. Not specifically world music labels, but independent labels and professionals working in related areas. It has been very interesting, and I came away with one clear conclusion: making money from recorded music today is very difficult. Well, that could probably be said of almost any area of music, hehe.

The point is that, of all these areas, the one where I think I can bring the most distinctive value is sync. I have prepared a catalogue specifically for that purpose, which I will continue to expand soon. You can find it here.

Remember: if you have any news of interest for our community, let me know. Thank you very much for your attention.

Araceli Tzigane | Mapamundi Música | +34 676 30 28 82 

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IN DEPTH WITH IAN BRENNAN

While reading the first part of the interview, you may want to listen to Sometimes It Just Takes That Long: 1987–2015, a career-spanning compilation of Ian Brennan’s own recordings. It is interesting as a piece of context: Ian himself has spoken critically about those early recordings, and that self-awareness helps frame the way he now approaches other people’s music, voices and stories.

Araceli Tzigane: Regarding the relevance of music and art in general to bring comfort to the world, on your website I read: “Music and other forms of art are by far the most effective kind of social-work that exists. A single, nameless one-hit wonder brings more comfort to the world than almost any single psychologist can hope to in a lifetime.” Can you tell me about a work of art that has had that kind of impact on you personally?

Ian Brennan: Yeah, I think there are many. But certainly, growing up art was very important to my well-being, you know, to my survival, I would say. I think that art, especially music, because of the fact that it involves the voice and voice is such a personal instrument that… Music was a true lifeline for me. And most people, I think, in modern life, potentially get more intimacy from an artist they’ve never met than from people they are acquainted with, and even, sadly in some cases, than from people who are family or with whom they have close relationships.

But for me, aside from just so many songs and people, Bruce Springsteen was very important to me as a child, simply because he wrote stories. Not always, but at his best, he would write stories in the music. And so bringing real storytelling together with music that was, in many cases, heartfelt was important to me, you know, in terms of just understanding the world and what I wanted to do.

AT: Do you sing yourself or have you ever sung or have a band or something? 

IB: Yeah, that was the goal. The goal for me was to never have to do anything else. I was very obsessed to an unhealthy degree with practicing. So that when I became legal age and had to find a way to survive coming from a working-class background, I felt like I would have failed if I ever did anything other than music. But in fact, my life has been entirely that, you know, that I’ve had to find ways to make money aside from music. The goal was to be an artist and to have success. I didn’t want fame, but I wanted to have a platform and to make money. I had no material goals. I still don’t have, really. But my goal was to get to a point where I could then use that platform to help other people.

So when that failed to happen, and I put out a bunch of records, I think 10 records that I put out, and they were horrible records, most of them. But that’s kind of how I learned to be a producer, it was by making bad records and being my own worst enemy because they could have been a lot better if I’d gotten out of my own way and been less fearful and less controlling. And so when none of that happened at a certain point, I just decided, well, I’ll just skip ahead and do the things that I wanted to do, on a smaller scale, the things that I hope to do if I had more success.

So, organizing benefit shows to raise money for charities, you know, but instead of raising hopefully a lot of money, I’d thought, by playing a big concert, I’d be able to raise a thousand or $5,000 for something.

And similarly, now, producing and trying to provide platforms for people in whatever way we can, but it’s always a bit painful because, obviously if things had gone the way I’d hoped, we’d have a lot better ability to bring these voices to more people. But whatever we can do, we’re going to do. But it all comes from being a writer and being a songwriter and that base is very important to the records, in terms of understanding musicians, but also what works and what doesn’t work and what they’re doing.

Ghosts of Namibia’s Skeleton Coast, Himba Hymn is Ian Brennan’s most recent album, and it is truly a very particular work. Some pieces are almost eerie, with voices and textures that seem to come from a place outside the usual logic of songs, arrangements or polished production.

 

AT: So you don’t come from a privileged class. You say you come from a working-class family, also like me. So how do you finance these projects? Because you say you are not getting money from these kinds of things. For instance, this “Ghosts of Namibia’s Skeleton Coast, Himba Hymn”, so far I understand there are 500 vinyl copies to be sold. The rest is only digital. So the rest of income will be streaming and digital sales. Maybe you will get some money from synchronization but you never know about this, if this may happen or not. So I think you won’t even recover the cost of this production. How do you manage to make this? 

IB: These are money-losing labors of love. I mean, they’re self-financed always and I admire people that have the patience to get grants and to do the paperwork, but that’s very antithetical to my goals and what I want to do with my time. Doing paperwork and bureaucracy gives me a headache. I’ve had to do a lot of it now helping people come to the UK and to Australia and sometimes Europe or America. So, I’ve gotten better at it, meaning my patience level is greater. Before, I just couldn’t do it almost. So I admire people that can do that. I struggle with it sometimes because I see people sometimes that get a lot of money for things that I don’t think are that valuable. And that’s very frustrating when I see people we work with struggling to feed their families and struggling to be able to send their kids to school and things like this. So, we self-finance them. They don’t make money usually at all. I mean, not only do they not recoup, they usually don’t make any real money, with rare exceptions.

So we’ve been lucky to continue, but we always say we don’t know how much longer we’ll be able to do this. Every year it’s kind of like, well, let’s see. Can we keep going? We have many records now. Ever since around COVID time, we started really trying to get ahead of ourselves, so to speak. And so, we have a backlog of records. But as far as new records, it’s always each year like, well, I don’t know if we can keep doing this. It’s expensive, but I feel like it’s worthwhile.

But we’ve been able to do that in two ways, because I teach violence prevention and I can make fairly good money with that. So that income goes towards this and, you know, a lot of that income also goes towards paying rent and surviving in a very expensive world. We don’t have a car, we don’t own a house. We rent. That sort of thing. But we put the money towards that.

And I also have worked with a comedian in America since 2001 and that was something that I started doing for charity, meaning I organized a charitable event and he did it. But then he wanted to continue and so I realized, well, okay, maybe I should do this for profit. And it became just kind of an extra thing. It wasn’t the core but it’s become a very significant part of the income and that helps as well. But he’s 80 years old so this will not go on forever.

So I don’t know what the future holds. But we’ll keep doing it for as long as we can in whatever form we can. We certainly are committed to maintaining relationships with everybody we’ve worked with whenever possible. And that’s almost all of them in some form. We still have contact, whether once a year or whatever but, you know, we still have some thread. Usually these are collective projects so it’s maybe one person out of the collective, the person who might speak English or the person who has internet access at all, or more easily. With The Good Ones we’ve been working with since 2009 and the Malawi Mouse Boys who we’ve been working with since 2011, I think it is. It’s ongoing and we do what we can to try to help them even though there’s no income from the records. You know, we did five albums with The Good Ones and we did four albums with Malawi Mouse Boys and the last album was in 2018. And the label that the first three of their albums were on isn’t in business anymore even. So, there’s, literally I mean, not even a penny of income. But we’re committed to doing what we can to try to continue to help and also, hoping that maybe there’ll be opportunities for them to perform again. And that’s where they can make some money, where they can maybe come and make a few thousand dollars, which has a lot of utility in their case. It can last years if they’re careful with managing money.

You can also listen to The Good Ones’ album Rwanda, You Should Be Loved, a powerful example of the kind of work discussed in this interview.

 

AT: There are so many steps that have to be taken for them finally to be able to go abroad, perform a concert and earn some money. You need to be really resilient, because you have to deal with their visas, maybe visas for some of the places where you go too, you have to buy the flights, handle all the production, so it’s really a huge amount of work. I will go to a question I have for later but I think this is the moment. Sometimes I would like to ask the world music industry to do more of this kind of thing, but you know perfectly well how much this costs, and how much personal devotion it takes to make it happen. I also feel like this: sometimes I do things that don’t bring me any money, and I put a lot of work into them. I can’t really ask other institutions, companies or people like me to make this investment, because they are businesses. Some years ago, I thought everybody involved in this industry had some kind of ethical and philosophical approach to this kind of music. But I realized: no.

But do you think that the world music industry is not really contributing to the democratization that you pursue in the music? Because I feel that in most of the festivals and showcases I see highly polished productions and safe choices. If you agree with this, what would you ask to the world music sector to change or to reflect on? What would you change in the way it operates to increase the democratization you are searching for?

IB: Well, I think I’m not against anything. I believe in freedom and so I’m not judging anyone else. I’m speaking pragmatically, I try to be a pragmatist. I understand that, when people are doing it for profit, it’s difficult. In any instance, with any kind of music and even more with music that’s in languages that don’t have many speakers like English does and Spanish does and Hindi, Mandarin or Cantonese.

So I understand the challenges and I think it’s just a different set of objectives. And I think a lot of people do probably go in with more of an idealistic vision, but then, they’re dealing in the nuts and bolts of what can work and not work. So, in general, I don’t like genres. So, I don’t really like world music. I don’t like bluegrass. I don’t like any genre really. I like artists within genres. And I think most of the music I like shares a certain honesty. So even though, superficially, on the surface, they may seem different, to me they’re not. Chavela Vargas and anyone else that I listen to, Nick Drake, the early Sex Pistols, to me, they’re all the same in a sense. As a genre, I don’t like most of that slick, polished stuff, but I understand that other people do.

So, when we go to record, which we’re going to record twice this summer, a lot of times there are people that I realize, “Wow, this is something that probably more people would like, but it’s not something that I believe in and that I want to support”. It’s just a different aesthetic essentially. But it is certainly easier, understandably, bureaucratically, just convenience, economically, to have people that are not really from a place, so to speak, that they’re from the diaspora or they’re second or third generation. I think all those things are great. I’m not against any of that. It’s just it shouldn’t be confused with somebody who’s actually from a village in Malawi. That should not be confused with someone who was born to a Malawian parent or parents in Toronto. These are two very different things.

And what happens a lot with global festivals is you’re getting people that live in Europe. You’re getting people that live in America. You’re getting people that have power passports where they don’t need the visas or they can get the visas. But it’s nearly impossible for some people to get visas. And almost every artist we work with, when we’ve applied for them, even with WOMAD, because WOMAD is really the basis of all this for us, they almost every single one of them, I think except in one case, have been turned down and so we have to then reapply, it can’t be appealed, and you have to do it within 90 days. So you can’t do it in advance so that you got time and then so it’s really dependent on how soon they come to a decision to say no. And the “no” has oftentimes been entirely incorrect. One time they rejected the visa for, I think, Khmer Rouge Survivors. They rejected the visas because they said they weren’t listed on the WOMAD lineup, but they were, but there was nothing we could do. We had to start all over again.

It’s very, very, very challenging, very, very expensive. And what a lot of people I think don’t realize is that it’s even more difficult than they might imagine. So, in the case of Comoros, in the case of South Sudan, a lot of the really small, more isolated nations, meaning globally isolated politically, to get a visa you have to go to another country. So just to go and try to get a visa, they’ve got to go to another nation. And a lot of times these are artists that have never been outside of their nation, and they’ve got to go to another nation just to apply. And then they get rejected. It costs huge amounts of money. There is huge risk.

With the Acholi Machon, who we produced two records for, and they ultimately were able to come to WOMAD in 2015, they had to go to Kenya and they lived near the border of Kenya. South Sudan is large but they live near the border but they’d never been into Kenya. Going there was very dangerous for them. They were extorted for large sums of money by border authorities. Then they got to Nairobi and got completely ripped off by the guesthouse they stayed at. They were charged European prices for really horrible conditions, paying hundreds of dollars for a place that was actually pretty awful. So it was dangerous for them physically and financially.

It’s just I think understandably hard for most people that live in Europe or Japan or in the United States or Canada and a few other nations to understand that you can’t just book a flight. It would be so nice, it would be so great if somebody said “yeah, we want to have this artist come” and all we had to do was make the arrangements but it’s not that, you know.

In the interview, Ian speaks about countries that many people could not even place on a map, and recordings such as For Those Left Behind by Famo Mountain, from Lesotho (in the video), or Afar Ways by Yanna Momina, from Djibouti, bring that idea into sound.

 

AT: At least it’s good that these kinds of reflections are said openly for the people working in this because, as you said, we can’t request people to do these kinds of things, they have their own personal struggles for their survival. Indeed, this is a, let’s say, economically a very weak “industry”, with very small companies. But I think we have to keep this situation in mind.
So how do you choose the topic for an album? What is the process behind it?

IB: We always have a lot of things going on, ideas in the background, and sometimes they come together very quickly. In a sense, fate plays a role, where it’s like, “okay, this is something that’s easier to do on practical levels”, you know. Maybe getting there is easier, maybe it’s cheaper, maybe… all of the above. So we have all these ideas that we brainstormed and that we work on. But usually it takes years. You have the idea and then there are obviously things that can interfere, COVID interfered, death and illness of musicians have interfered before, sadly. But eventually then it comes to be realized. And then when we go, in almost all the cases, we don’t know what we’re going to find or what’s going to be there. So, there’s no guarantee. And then the story kind of emerges on its own, based on what we experience and what we find. But we’re interested in mostly trying to go to populations that are underrepresented or, it could be argued, not represented at all in international media.

So, in other words, there is, you know… Mali has great music and is, understandably, hugely represented compared to other nations where there’s not been a single artist in the media. So, the stories often just start with that, with the fact that so many of these nations are nations that people don’t have any real familiarity with, if they even know that they exist. You know, Trump mispronounced the name of Namibia. With Lesotho, where we did a record, he disparaged the country and said that it’s a place no one’s ever heard about, no one cares about. So, it’s quite literal in that sense. Many people we talk to will say, “What is that?”  When you name a country, they’ll say, “What is Djibouti?” We did a record from there. A lot of people weren’t aware. With the Oman record that’s coming out, most people might or might not know Oman. They might have a vague idea. They probably know it’s in the Middle East. But they certainly have never heard music from there.

These are massive omissions when you consider what digital music has done, digital distribution. Prior to digital distribution, there wasn’t really that much music out there in the world. I mean, there was still a lot, more than people could really listen to or buy on record, but it was finite, for sure. But now, with over 100,000 songs uploaded a day, even if it’s out there, even if someone who lives in a capital city rather than a rural area has an internet connection and a laptop, they can produce music and upload something to Spotify. Twenty percent of the things on Spotify aren’t listened to by anybody, ever.

It’s a start but it’s an illusion largely. There is music from “place X” on the internet. But it’s not really being heard and not really given a fair chance. It’s hugely imbalanced.

Later in the interview, Ian speaks about the Zomba Prison Project, recorded inside Malawi’s maximum-security Zomba Prison. Their first album, I Have No Everything Here, brought the project international attention and was even featured on the front page of The New York Times.

 

AT: Related to this in your book “Field recording and the battle for democracy in the arts”, you argue that recording people outside the music industry is a way of democratizing who has the right to be heard. But once these recordings have been made and are available to anyone with internet access — as you are saying, they are out there — is that enough? Because if this is the work of democratization, doesn’t it also require actively increasing the visibility of those recordings and of the people behind them? Democratization also needs one more step, not just recording.

IB: Oh, yeah. I think that, again, now with the technologies… Technologies are good and bad. So, with digital technologies, essentially everybody now is a photographer, everyone has a camera and they can create an image that looks good. But it’s an illusion because actually the photos on cameras are absent a lot of the material, just like the digital music is absent a lot of the frequencies. But they can do that. So the danger is that it just increases this volume of information that people are competing against. I really strongly feel, you know, when people want to go and film or want to go and record something, it’s like, “please don’t, don’t do this unless you really are committed to trying to support it”. Just don’t throw it up online. And even if it gets lots of views, it doesn’t have any real substance, it’s just something that people look at on the train on their phone while they’re scrolling for 5 seconds. And I think that’s not what’s needed. I think what’s needed is a deeper attention for everyone for their own well-being, to attend to the music for a period of time, to listen to it truly with attention. And that’s the beauty of a live concert, historically at least, especially a seated live concert: for 30 minutes, 60 minutes, 90 minutes, whatever, people are giving their attention. And that’s rare nowadays. It’s almost impossible for most people to do that. They’re used to being able to stop and to pause and to rewind and to not have to do things at a scheduled time and all of that.

So, we are very committed to trying to support these artists as best we can, meaning to try to find promotion for them and to try to spread the word. And it’s gotten harder. It has not gotten easier. It was never easy, but it’s become much much much more difficult. And it was becoming more difficult prior to COVID. And then during COVID there was kind of an openness where people really, I think genuinely, were more in touch with their fellow man and were more interested in balance and equality. So there was this window where suddenly a lot of opportunities happened that never would have happened at any other time. But following COVID it’s really been worse than ever and a lot of it is because of what’s happening again with the technologies, with the closing of magazine after magazine after magazine and reductions in staff and the newer generation who have been raised in this idea of views dictating content and so. If that’s what you’re chasing, then what you are going to focus on is celebrity. Now it’s not only that they’re not covering what’s really out there or a diverse range of what’s out there. It’s they’re repetitively covering certain people because they know, if I post a story about Taylor Swift, it’s going to get a lot of views. And if I mention this person who’s the daughter or son of so-and-so, it will get attention.

So it’s very lazy ultimately but it’s driven by this system. The system itself has become very flawed because previously if you were writing for the New York Times you didn’t know how many people read your article and your bosses didn’t care how many people read your article. You were entrusted because of your skill and your experience to write in an ethical way and to present information that is valuable and they knew, “okay, 100,000 people buy this paper every day”, but you know, they don’t know who reads what and certainly they know less people read what’s 20 pages into the paper than what was on the front page. But nobody thought if you write about the Velvet Underground that you’ve got to get a certain number of readers. It’s just that a writer would choose to write about the Velvet Underground because they knew this is an important record even though it only sold a few thousand copies when it was released. So that’s kind of the crisis and the conundrum now: getting support for artists has never been harder than it is right now.

AT: About The Zomba Prison Project and “I Have No Everything Here”, the project was featured on the front page of The New York Times. It sometimes seems that non-mainstream music is not enough by itself to attract the attention of major media. The story is what sells sometimes, not the music itself. The storytelling seems to be more important than the music. 

IB: I think also, as I was saying that I really think people shouldn’t go out and record unless they’re really committed to it. It shouldn’t be something casual. And I abhor this idea of looking at people as content, because it objectifies your fellow man. It’s great if there’s a story but I don’t think a story should be generated. I think the music ultimately has to stand on its own. The thing with the Zomba Prison Project was that the music did stand on its own, meaning there are some very strong songs on that album, melodies, craft. That’s always been a factor for me. And going back to what you asked earlier about world music. I think that’s what’s absent from so much world music is that it’s more based on mood and feel, you know, kind of, sometimes, party music. All that’s great. It works very well in a live environment. You know, let’s say, the old cliche that dance bands don’t make good albums usually, and that’s usually true. Yet you could go see that band live and it could be one of the best concerts you ever saw. It’s hard to capture that on a record. So, my focus has always been on songs, songs, songs, songs, like people that really can write strong songs and most of these albums feature some if not many of those, from individuals.

With Zomba Prison, there were two albums, and on each of them there were a few really stunning songs. I once spoke with a famous figure in world music about Zomba Prison, and they were very dismissive of them, very disparaging. I bit my tongue, I held my tongue, but I remember thinking: this person has never written a song as strong as some of those songs, and never will. I don’t think they’re capable of it, spiritually capable.

So I think, yes, the story is important but the music has to be there too. The ideal is that you have both but the music has to stand on its own. For me, the hope is always — the vision is always — that somebody hears it, whether it’s now or in 10 or 20 years. They overhear it in a café, or in a bookstore, or, let’s say, on the radio, or in a record store, and it impacts them. And they don’t know what it is, and maybe they’ll never find out what it is. They’ll never know what language it was in, who sang it, what country it was from. They won’t know any of that stuff, or when it was recorded. But I still think it has value.
I think some of the most valuable moments are the ones that are accidental, not created by an algorithm and not something that somebody feels like they have to listen to be cool, but just something that impacts them. And I think we’ve all had those experiences, where you hear something and it strikes you and you’ll probably never know what it was.

AT: Now we have Shazam, hehe.

IB: Yeah, hehe, you can try, but sometimes, you know, you’re not in a position to find out, and then you just have to try to piece it together. But sometimes you never can piece together what it was.

AT: Yes. Exactly. And regular radio, FM radio is almost disappearing. It was a way for people to discover things they were not searching for, or being guided towards. And now everything is online and on demand. So yes, we are losing many opportunities for these situations to happen. And it’s really sad. But what I mean is that sometimes you need to find a way to make the storytelling interesting enough for journalists, because it feels almost more important than the music itself. I feel that, and I feel like you: music itself should be enough. For me, music is an aesthetic experience. It’s like a message. Sometimes you don’t understand what the message is, but you feel there is something there. So I totally agree with you but I feel I have to shape everything with some story, background, history… whatever else, to bring attention to the music. 

IB: Yeah. Yeah. It’s frustrating, but that is something that increasingly is shared by even commercial products and commercial artists and movie stars and all these young pop stars now. They never, ever, ever — I mean, I saw this beginning to happen in the 90s and then escalating more and more — they never come out and are just like, “Oh yeah, I’m normal.” They never… They’ve always got this trauma and this and that, and, you know, it’s just so clear in many of their cases that this is all manipulation.
You know, it’s meaning that these are commercial products, part of a corporate system, and there’s been a bunch of people gathered in a room who are like, “Okay, how are we going to spin this?” Basically, we need to come up with something. You’ve got to claim some identity thing that makes you different. And you can see that they’re just grasping at straws. It’s not genuine.
It’s very different than before, where maybe the story really came from a place where it was formative for somebody, as opposed to somebody reaching and trying to create a narrative that doesn’t really exist.

This playlist comes from Stop the Violence (Put Those Guns Down), a recording that expands the idea of a music album beyond songs: here, voices, spoken word and lived experience become sound, giving space to people who are too often heard only through the frame of violence, survival or victimhood.

 

AT: Yes. And in courses or talks for artists, this is always present. You have to find how to identify and define yourself as something different: what makes you particular, what makes you different from other people, and so on…

I have another question that I’m very curious about. In the album “Stop the Violence (Put Those Guns Down)”, some of the participants are not artists, and some of the tracks are spoken-word rather than songs. Why do you use the format of a music release to address an issue like this? But now, after this conversation, I understand that you are not really trying to address the topic itself. You are searching for the sounds behind it, and for the sounds that these people — who are often not heard, or are heard only through the lens of being survivors, people who could have been victims and survived — are producing in the world. Sometimes it is not music; sometimes it is spoken word. Is that right?

IB: It is right. This is the ability I have, to try to raise awareness or provide outlets or platforms for people’s recordings. We’ve got a lot of stuff we’ve not released. A lot of stuff, because we don’t believe in it. And sometimes, again, that’s the stuff that maybe would sell, like stuff that would be more slick or mainstream. But a lot of the favorite projects that we’ve done are with non-musicians, meaning people that have never sung publicly before, people that have never written songs before, maybe never written poetry before, all of the above. And you never know in those situations what’s going to happen. Sometimes it doesn’t work, but oftentimes it works incredibly well.
You know, if nothing else, the impact — the vocal impact — can be very strong. Sometimes there’s no affectation. And I did a talk for some neuroscientists a few years ago, and they told me that — because I was talking about liking to work with amateur musicians, but also liking to work with virtuosos, like Ustad Saami. I mean, I love working with master musicians as well. We’ve worked with a lot of master musicians from Vietnam, and some in Cambodia and with Ustad Saami, and others. That’s great also. But they said that, neurologically, when somebody is a novice and when somebody is an expert, their brain activity is nearly identical when they’re creating. It’s in between the novice and the expert that things kind of shut down and become less balanced and less integrated.
What’s similar about the novice and the master is that instead of using just, you know, certain concentrated parts of their brain, they’re using all of their brain. There’s all this interconnectivity and this freedom, essentially.

And so, you know, a lot of those projects we’ve done — with the Chicago gunfire survivors, with the War Women of Kosovo, with the women in the witch camps in Ghana, with a lot of the people at Zomba Prison as well, a lot of the people who were involved, and with many of the people in the Taa community, where we did a record in Botswana — I think those are some of the most amazing and strong recordings we’ve ever done. Because, for me, I try not to be judgmental. It’s not whether I like it or don’t like it. It’s whether it sounds like something I’ve never heard before.

And number one, if you do it in languages that are not represented, there’s musicality within language, you know. And so I think it’s already a given that there are going to be elements there that are very different than people singing English over and over and over and over and over again, and even the same English words, and rhyming them the same, and all that stuff.

So there’s already this musicality. But additionally, because the people are coming from a very clean place — meaning they’re starting from what they feel in the moment, and they’re not up in their heads, and they’re really guided by intuition and impulse — some incredibly unique sounds are oftentimes created.

And so the record you’re talking about, the Chicago Gunfire Survivors, that one… Tanzania Albinism Collective is another one, with people who had not sung before or played before. Some of the vocals on there are as touching and as emotionally wrenching as I think is possible in a recorded environment. I mean, there are exact moments. There’s a moment, 58 seconds into a song, where Amadu from the Tanzania Albinism Collective — who was one of the four people who were able to come to WOMAD; there were almost 20 people involved in the actual recording, but four of them came to WOMAD — there’s a moment 58 seconds into a song where you can hear him get in touch with his anger for the first time, towards all the abuse that he’d suffered and the danger.

And it’s just such an incredible moment, so courageous, and something that I think it would be impossible not to be touched by if you’re listening to it, if you’re paying attention to it.

So, yeah, I actually, in general, prefer working with people who are not “musicians,” quote-unquote, because they tend to have a lot of judgment, a lot of baggage, and they usually aren’t very free. And also, they tend to be very insecure.
The masters are not insecure, you know, so they’re very free. But it’s the in-between. So, on a lot of these projects, there’s usually one musician — like the person who already knows how to play guitar, or another instrument, or has performed — and we always record them. But oftentimes they’re not on the record, because they’re usually just not that compelling. You know, they’re fine, they’re not bad. But I think mediocrity is really the ultimate enemy to art.

This next playlist comes from Afar Ways by Yanna Momina, the Djiboutian singer from the Afar people whose voice Ian Brennan helped bring to a wider audience, and whose music gives sound to one of those places that too often remain almost invisible on the global musical map.

 

AT: So when you go to some group of people like this, they are aware that you are going to record. Can they prepare themselves? Do you give them some time to think what they are going to record or to say or is it more immediate? 

IB: It depends. Every situation is a little different. If we’re fortunate, we have time to prepare in advance. We’ve got somebody that we can talk to in the community and so on. With the Tanzania Albinism Collective, we were working with Standing Voice, which is a great organization from the UK that helps the community. They were able to prepare people, and to go to the community first and foremost and say, “Who wants to do this?” So not everybody did, obviously. There was a core group of people who were interested. And then I sent them music in advance and said, “Here’s stuff to listen to. Weird stuff from all over the world. Just check this out and see what you think of any of it.”

But the basic instruction is: write about whatever you want to write about. You don’t have to sing. You can talk, you can do poetry, you can do rap. It doesn’t have to be a song. Meaning, there’s no pressure. It can be 20 seconds long, it can be 30 seconds long.
I mean, a lot of the stuff we do is very short, and I think a lot of it is better that way, which kind of comes from the punk rock background, where a lot of great hardcore albums from the early 80s are 15, 20 minutes long — a whole album — and a lot of the songs are one minute long each.

Or Guided by Voices, where the main writer, the only writer essentially, the songs are just the hooks. He plays the hook and it’s over. He doesn’t make it three minutes. It’s usually a minute or two, and yet he’s super prolific. He’s got hook after hook after hook after hook, without belaboring it.

And so, that’s all. The encouragement is just to try, and that there’s no judgment. And the only direction I ever give people — and I mean it — is to play bad. Try to be bad. Don’t try to be good. Just don’t worry about being good or bad. Just play as bad as you possibly can. And that usually frees people up quite a bit.

AT: Okay. I would like to go back to an idea that we talked about before: that music is being produced daily, and hundreds of thousands of songs are uploaded to Spotify. So I feel that it is very easy for musicians to begin a career now. Let’s say I just record something and put it on the internet. So my career is starting; I’ve taken the first step. But the following steps are more difficult than ever. The same applies to promotion and everything around it. I think this is increasing frustration in the world. Do you agree?

IB: Well, yeah. I think in general that I’m not sure people should make a living from music, meaning most artists. I think the best music is music that’s made for its own sake.

And what we’ve lost in most places in the world — not everywhere, but in most places in the world — is people making music just to make music, to entertain themselves.

And one of the beautiful things when we were in Djibouti with the late Yanna Momina, who sadly passed away just prior to being scheduled to come to WOMAD, a few months prior, is that it was really important to them. Djibouti is a relatively small nation, but they don’t even come from the capital. They come from quite far away, in the desert, and without electricity — which a lot of the artists we work with live without, electricity and running water.

And they wanted us to know: this is what we do. This is what we do at night. This is what we do after dark. This is the way we entertain ourselves.

And I think that’s been lost to a large degree. And so, you know, the onus that’s been put on artists — whether it’s authors or musicians or otherwise — has become, again, the views, the fact that you can see the number of views. And with authors, the publisher wants the author to do all the work, and it becomes a chicken-and-egg situation. Like, they don’t want to put out a book unless somebody’s got tons of followers already. And something is lost in that, because what gets rewarded is ambition and not talent. And I think so many of the most talented people are introverted, and they’re shy, and maybe insecure, and maybe they’re battling depression, or even psychosis and addiction.

And so what gets lost, I think, is that it’s not a meritocracy. Somebody could say it is, but it’s this battle of the numbers. And so I think what is lacking for most people — what I’ve seen over the years, because I’ve been doing this for so long, for so many decades — is stamina. People don’t have stamina. So I’m always reassured by that. It’s like, somebody comes on strong, and they’re kind of pushy and aggressive, and it’s like: yeah, but they don’t have the stamina for this. They didn’t have the stamina for this in the 80s and 90s, when I started, and they certainly don’t have the stamina for it today.

But the corporate structures — because these are products, you know, these people are products — once they have a product and they have a brand, they’re going to milk it for all it’s worth. Meaning, they already have planned obsolescence. This person is not going to be on top forever, but they know that there’s going to be a second and a third wave where they can make money off this person eventually. But to the artist, it’s very degrading, because their art, or whatever artistry they’re involved in, is not being supported.

But unfortunately, with the corporations consolidating — the recording companies shrinking down to fewer and fewer companies, all interrelated — and also with the agencies and the deregulations, you’ve got agencies owning venues and owning festivals, it’s just a more and more closed system, where the person who owns the festival and owns the venue also basically owns the artist, and is plugging those artists into this system, and not reaching beyond that pool because they don’t really have the patience to do it anyway. It’s coming to them. The competition is so severe that they’re not out searching for talent. They don’t have time to, and they probably don’t even have interest in it, because they’ve got a thousand candidates who are willing to do almost anything for attention.

I think it doesn’t reward… I think the listeners and the viewers are the ones who ultimately suffer as a result of this, because the content is not going to be as strong. It’s not going to be as diverse and strong.

AT: You are from the United States and you have been living in Italy for 17 years. So, you know, how things work in the United States and how things work in Europe. You said something before, that you don’t think everybody has to make their living from music. Music can also be played just for fun or for expression. I agree with you. But you see how people in the cultural sector are always calling for more public funding for music. What do you think? 

IB: Well, there’s always cause and effect. So, certainly, the investment in the arts is greater in Europe than it is in America. In America, it’s been stripped, you know, forever. It never really was heavily invested in.

When I was in public school in America, at my high school, which had almost 2,000 people, they cut every single art class except one — or they had two. They had ceramics and they had art, and they put them at the same time, so you couldn’t take both. You could only take one. They had only one vocal class, and they had only one music class for the whole school. So there’s that cutting, cutting, cutting, cutting, and that lack of investment.

Now, that same lack of investment, in many ways, was a stimulus to the birth of rap in New York City, because there weren’t instruments like there had been historically in the post-World War II era, where schools would have trumpets around for kids, and saxophones, and maybe a drum kit, and things for them to play and learn.

That’s largely what rap was born out of: the impulse to make music is still going to be there. And so, again, a lot of the favorite music we’ve done has been with people who build their own instruments, who make instruments out of found objects and recycled things, who use percussion especially, that tends to be found in the environment.

But ultimately, the pursuit of an external goal is not a good way, to me, to make music in general. I mean, good things can come from it accidentally, so to speak. But whether it’s somebody wanting to be famous, or wanting to make millions of dollars, or whether it’s so many of the people I grew up playing music with, who are still playing music, and they have this idea that they’re going to be like Nick Drake, or they’re going to be like the Modern Lovers, or they’re going to be like Big Star, or they’re going to be like Rodriguez. Now they’re thinking posthumously, you know, like: “Okay, when I die…” I mean, they don’t say it out loud, but when they die, somebody’s going to discover them and they’re going to become beloved. And it’s like: no, it’s not going to happen. You’re not Nick Drake. You’re not that good. You’re okay. You’re mediocre. And again, it’s that thing of mediocrity.

So I think just playing music to play music is always going to be the best. And even in recording, so many of the best songs come when somebody’s done recording. Even when we record naturally, outdoors and live, and all that stuff, still, the mi nute you tear down the microphones, somebody starts playing a song, and it’s like: “What is that? What? You played 20 songs. What is that song?”
And that is oftentimes, by far, the strongest song, because they’re free. They’re free at that point.And so, even in that context, it’s hard to get to that point where people are really, truly playing music for relational reasons that are not transactional, or even just for themselves.

When we discovered The Good Ones, we’d been looking for two weeks in Rwanda for music, and we’d found a lot of music, and a lot of it was fine, but nothing super compelling. And we overheard someone playing music who was not playing it for anybody. He was just practicing. And that’s what led us to The Good Ones. We were like: “That’s what we’ve been looking for.” And he said, “Well, if you like this, you’ve got to hear my teacher, who taught me to play music.” And that’s what led us to The Good Ones. So, you know, it was not performative at all. I mean, he was embarrassed to be heard. He was hiding, essentially.

Thank you, Ian!!!

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At a time when the war in Ukraine continues to shape daily life in ways that many of us outside the country can hardly imagine, it is important not to look away from the resilience of Ukrainian cultural workers: artists, journalists, photographers, producers, festival organisers and all those who keep creating, connecting and working under such difficult circumstances. In this same spirit, Hudaki Village Band, from Transcarpathia, will release a new album in the coming weeks, a reminder that Ukrainian culture is not only surviving, but continuing to speak, move and create.

 

TALK WITH OLA KOVALEVSKA

AT: So, Urban Lys is your NGO, or is this different?

OK: Urban Lys… first it was a cultural initiative, a workshop of creative ideas, Urban Lys. And then I registered it as an NGO. It still exists in Ukraine, it’s registered in Ukraine. But during the period of COVID, we had challenges with live events, which we were mostly busy with. We were making different concerts, workshops, painting murals, making some sketches, urban sketching meetings, whatever we could imagine. And also we had a souvenir project, like art souvenirs, made with artists.

I was living in the city of Sumy. Sumy is 20 kilometres from Russia. Now it’s really difficult there. At that moment, we were making a lot of stuff. When COVID started, it was difficult to continue, and that’s why we focused on the representation of musicians. We focused on services. We focused on making EPKs for Ukrainian musicians, also together with the Ukrainian Institute.

Actually, this first EPK case for the export of our Ukrainian jazz musicians was based on my website, because of the limited budgets and all that stuff. And then later we made a catalogue. And that was already more serious, of course. So I kind of started going into services because of this situation, and going more into promotion, into marketing, branding and this kind of direction. And now, here in Germany, I think I’m having this comeback to the first idea. It’s more like curating a platform, a cultural platform, a hub of different cross-sectoral projects, where, of course, there is a place for musicians, there is a place for some services, but also there is a place — and this is the most important — for curating, creating and producing music projects.

For example now, I mean, it’s not… We just applied for a grant, so I don’t know if it will happen or not, and I will not name the musicians. But I will say that now we are making a very interesting project with the Ukrainian instrument bandura and the West African kora.

And that was a very unexpected fact: that their sound is very close in timbre. They look totally different, they are made of different materials, and they even have a different technique, a little bit. But the sound… When I was listening to kora, I was like: “Oh my God, this is like bandura. This is exactly like bandura.” And so that was our idea with Aly Keïta, really, to make this project with kora and bandura and balafon. And the fourth instrument will be a secret, because I don’t know if we will get this grant, and I don’t want to make a spoiler.

But it’s just an example of what we are developing. And we plan, of course, to make workshops within this residency, and to try to get really important and good partners for this presentation. So we will see what happens. I don’t want to get too far ahead of events, but we are developing. And I’m very proud and thankful, grateful, for this possibility to continue my professional activities.

What I wanted to say is that it’s really a privilege to be supported by the German music export office, Initiative Musik, and to be part of the German delegation to WOMEX two times, two years in a row, and to get financial support for travelling.

And I hope this year we will also be there at WOMEX. I’m really looking forward to the showcase and conference. And especially I love the conference because of all the printed materials. I love them. I love branding and marketing. This is my passion.

Taras Kompanichenko is one of Ukraine’s most respected contemporary kobzars and bandura players. I think this is a good moment to take a little time to listen to one of Ukraine’s most emblematic instruments.

 

AT: Related to that, well, I have many questions. One is about cultural diplomacy, because you mentioned that you work between journalism, artist development and cultural diplomacy. So, about artist development, I have been in touch with you mainly because of your work with Aly Keïta. With him, I understand that you do all these things you were talking about: you make the EPKs, you work with him on communication and all these things. What more do you do for artist development? What kind of activities are included in your work?

OK: Artist development starts from branding. And what is branding? It’s not just a marketing word. It’s finding out, or figuring out, what it is that makes this artist special compared to others.
It can be a very special instrument, it can be a very special stage look, it can be something very special about the music or about the combination of instruments in the band, or it can be a very special way to make something very traditional. I don’t know. It depends on the musician. Of course, every musician has their own vision. I help to find this vision and to figure out what they want from their career, what they expect to have in the future, and help them to get to this point in their career where they will think that they have what they need.And of course, we make priorities. For example, with Aly, the main priority, as he told me, was to release this album with Aly Keïta Trio. And so we are there now. It took me long, of course, because I’m a totally new person in Europe, and it was not easy. I’m so happy to have been able to find One World Records and Carolina Vallejo. She’s an amazing producer and publisher, and I can say that she really helped with this release. She gave us her heart, and we really feel it every moment.

We are dealing with all the processes, with all the support we receive from the distributors, from the label and from the agency we are working with, and again with the support of Initiative Musik, because they also supported this album release.

So yes, this is one direction. What else can I do? We can also develop projects starting from the idea and finishing with the press. I am this kind of PR person who believes that a true PR event doesn’t need to be paid. You don’t need to pay journalists so that they write about it. True PR is for free, and it should be an honest thing, without any staging. And what else? Of course, it goes down to these smaller parts like photography, videography, websites, EPKs, all kinds of social media presence and copywriting. But all these are much smaller than my expertise. They are more like tools that I use.

And that’s what we are helping to make: a strategy, to find out where it is that the artist wants to go, and also to correct a little bit when the artist wants all of it, which is unfortunately not possible to have.
So, yeah, I think it can be quite helpful. I mean, for me personally, I also used services, and I also learned a lot from business schools, from mentors who helped me to develop, and from teachers who were teaching in these different creative business enterprise programmes, for example from House of Europe.
So I think it’s always good to have a second thought from outside. Especially when you are deep into the music, you can’t have any idea how to pack this and how to bring this to the customer. And by customer, I mean the first customer of the musician, which is, of course, the promoter, not even the audience.

And this is the most difficult thing: how do you get to the promoter? So I’m not really doing too much booking, but I try to help Aly with this. And I see how difficult this is. It is really difficult work, and ungrateful, and very challenging.

I think I’m talking too long, but I think I have answered the question in general, about what it is that I can do. Yeah. I also try to do booking so much.

AT: So you have mentioned journalists. How is the situation of journalism for this kind of music nowadays in Germany, compared with some time before? And probably you also have an idea about this not only in Germany, but in Europe in general. How have you seen the development of music journalism for this non-commercial kind of music?

OK: Yes. It’s a very interesting question for me, because I can start from Ukraine. When I was studying at the Institute of Journalism, at university, there were several music magazines in Ukraine that were writing about this kind of music, and also about jazz music. It was called music that was not written about in other media — not pop music, not commercial music, right?

So, yeah, there were several magazines, but then they disappeared because of economic difficulties, and because they were mostly without any support. And now there are only online media which support themselves with the audience. They sell some subscriptions, and that’s how they survive. But there are only a few of them.

And the rest of what we get is this general press, general political and social press, where they have a small page for culture. There, we try to get there. And of course there are journalists who see this music, who respect and appreciate this kind of art very much, and they write about these kinds of events. So we get some press from the general media. There is also, of course, Radio Kultura in Kyiv, which covers the whole of Ukraine. And now, with the development of the internet and applications, everybody can listen from their own phone. They don’t even need cables anymore. Anyone can listen around the world. And Radio Promin, which has such a great history with jazz programmes by Oleksii Kogan, our acknowledged and very famous person in Ukraine. I mean, the most important person for jazz in Ukraine, I would say.

🔗 Radio Kultura – Радіо Культура | Радіо Культура
🔗 Radio Promin – Радіо Промінь | Радіо Промінь

And regarding Europe, I have this kind of experience with very interesting journalists who write about music, who write books, who also write for local media, like magazines or local press, and also online media. There are also all kinds of formats, for example your newsletter, or other kinds of newsletters or podcasts, or different formats that are developing right now.

And I was a little bit surprised that in the magazines, for example, you can’t get a feature there. Sometimes you don’t even get a review of a fresh release if you don’t pay for it. On one hand, I understand that they have to survive, and this is the only reason they exist until now, because they are paid for what they are writing about. But on the other hand, it means that all kinds of worthy music, without this special payment, stay overlooked. And only big labels, only big names, who have big teams and big commercial support, can be featured in these magazines.

So, on one hand, I understand this kind of business from a realistic point of view. And on the other hand, from my idealistic point of view, and from the things I learned at university, journalism has to be, how to say, unprejudiced. It has to be free, independent and true, and all kinds of good things and values.

I don’t see this, unfortunately, right now in these beautiful magazines where everybody wants to be printed. So I mean, maybe I’m wrong. I hope that they can prove me wrong, and I will be banned from them forever for my words. I hope it will not happen, of course. But I would like to write about music for these kinds of magazines, and to be able to write about those who don’t pay, because there are so many worthy projects that are surviving, as well as the media, of course, and they just deserve to be known and to be shown. And, yeah, not everything in this world is about money, right?

AT: Do you think storytelling about artists is more important recently than it was some years ago?

OK: Storytelling… I guess it’s not only about storytelling. I think it all goes into branding together. Now everybody speaks about storytelling — maybe even less now, but several years ago there was a huge direction in marketing about storytelling.

I guess what we are talking about is more about staying human, and letting other people know about your background, or, I mean, in the frame of music, what we are talking about. So I guess it’s important when there is an interesting background. People should, of course, know it, and you can, how to say, frame your music into it. But sometimes I think storytelling is just making things more complicated. Sometimes it’s just music, and you don’t want to know the stories around this music. You just want to have this music as an artifact, and not to know the musicians personally, or not to know what is behind it. It makes things more grounded and realistic, and sometimes you just want to dream and listen to the music.

So I guess it depends on the music exactly, which album we are talking about, or which music we are talking about. Some artists really need storytelling.

AT: Yeah, I asked you this because I have the impression that music itself is not enough for selling. It’s not enough. For me, music is, first of all, an aesthetic experience that can give me some pleasure or can make me dream, as you said. But I feel that’s not enough to sell. That’s why I am asking you if you feel storytelling is more important than before.

OK: I was writing in print magazines years ago, in magazines like the ones in Ukraine that don’t exist anymore now. At that time, I think music itself was enough. If the music was good, if it was beautiful, it was enough. Yes, you could want to know: “Oh, where did you come from?” or whatever. But now it is like all the environment around the music, all the background, and all the political, social things around it… I feel they are sometimes more important than the music itself. Yeah, I also have this impression. You’re right. I guess now we have come to the point where concepts are ruling this world, and concepts, and curating, and the reputation of those people who are curating. And I think it’s not enough just to make a funny album — I’m saying funny in a good way, because I know that somebody doesn’t like this word — good music. Yeah, somebody can just record good music.

But I mean, I think we were talking also about this on Facebook, somewhere in the comments: that the market is so overloaded with good music, because the entry to the market is so easy now that anyone can record an album sitting at home with a laptop. I mean, a different kind of album, but anyway, many musicians have studios at home now. They can just sit with their guitar, or bandura, or whatever they have, and record. It’s not so expensive right now.

And then they go to digital platforms and just drop these releases, you know, and that stuff gets lost. But also what exists is this marketing about marketing. I don’t know how to express this, but what makes marketing look plastic is this idea that you have to sell everything, and that everything should be over-branded, or I don’t know what else, how to express this.

There are so many offers, so many releases and so much good music that to stand out from all this amount of music we get… How many emails do you get every day? I can imagine hundreds of offers for booking: “Book me” or “Can you take us into your booking agency? Can you take us into your roster?” These can be great musicians, but you can’t physically afford to listen to all of this and to get into the details.

So I guess what we are facing now is that people are trying to use all kinds of marketing things they have ever heard about to stand out, to look different, to be visible, to be seen. And sometimes it gets funny, and sometimes it gets dramatic, and sometimes they just give up.

But some people succeed, and they learn how to do DIY as artists, how to deal with all kinds of issues, challenges and tasks on the way to being seen. Maybe this is also one of the ways, I mean, to make it yourself, if you have enough time and somebody else is also helping you with other things, like with booking, or… It depends on people, of course.

But, yeah, that’s what I learned: music is not enough. Without all kinds of services around it, all kinds of work to promote it, this music will stay even sometimes unreleased. I know several great albums which were recorded and not released due to different situations in musicians’ lives, right? And if they had had this management, this support, this storytelling and this marketing around them, this ecosystem around them, these albums would have been released.

AT: So do you often receive contacts from artists who want to work with you, or who want you to work for them?

OK: Yeah, quite often. 

AT: It happens to me, of course, too. What do you tell them? Imagine it makes sense, imagine it is something good, a good artist. What do you tell them?

OK: Right now I have changed my approach, and I have created packages of services for musicians. I offer them artist development support, or strategic development, as paid services. So they can book me for a year or two, and we will have some kind of strategic sessions. And of course, many things they will have to do themselves, or they will pay extra for these services. This is one way to deal with this. Of course, it’s not possible to answer everyone, of course. But there are some people who are more, how to say, in the close circle, and I try to explain that I am one person. Their music is great, and I will help them with what I can do, but I can’t just take them, because then they will expect something from me.

Also, several years ago it was not even possible to take anyone, because I didn’t know too many people. It is now, after I have visited several WOMEX and several jazzahead! editions, that I can say that I know somebody, I can help with something. But without these networks, it’s just not possible to give people hope. Hope for what exactly?

And then also, not all kinds of music are in my taste. I mean, I am a curating platform, and I would not prefer to have some kinds of music which I don’t think fit my vision. So that’s why, obviously, I tell them that I can’t work with them. I mean, I can give some advice, and I am open to it, but, yeah.

AT: And do the artists generally understand when you make them a paid offer? I ask you this because the approach, I think it happens probably to you, is that I feel they want you to start working for them, to find them bookings, to find them gigs, and most of the time they are not expecting that you will ask anything from them. I mean, they want you to work for free.

OK: Yes. Most of the time, yes. This is what I experience. Yes. This is how it is. And even some musicians say: “I don’t need any marketing. I don’t need any promotion. My music is enough. And if the music is cool, somebody will find me anyway.” So I guess this is how I came to this kind of services approach. I started as a music manager when I was 16, very early, and I did all kinds of work. And then, in the end, it was only about gigs for them. And they don’t even imagine how much work has been done to make a website, photo shootings, to write, to make press releases, to imagine something for them.

So musicians are developing also, and there are so many different lectures for them, educational programmes for musicians, where specialists explain to them how to make this or that, how to get gigs, how to get to the digital platforms or to the radio, what they want. And they learn, they start to understand how much work stands behind every result, and that nobody is booking them because they are so brilliant. They are booked because there is a very hard job behind it.

So with booking, of course, I think it’s a very, very ungrateful thing when it stands alone, without any other income for managers. And by managers, I mean promoters of culture. Not promoters who book the venue. I mean promoters who promote music and culture, and who work hard to get this grant, to get this funding, to get this sponsor, to get this label, to get this media. It’s an unfair situation if they are not paid from every concert the musician gets after all this kind of work, for example.

By the way, I have been to a conference in Berlin, Most Wanted: Music. It’s more in the pop music direction, but more like general music. And there was some discussion, like one panel — I don’t remember the name — but there was a manager from Great Britain, and he was talking about his experience of working with musicians. He told us that he has this contract system where musicians are very emerging, very beginning. He takes them, and he works a lot for them. And he gets paid 50%, or something like that, from each gig they get during this. But his task is not only just to book gigs. He also makes all kinds of promotion activities and organizes everything for them.

🔗 Most Wanted: Music

And there is also something I had never heard about. I mean, maybe you know this, and maybe others will say: “Ah, nothing new for us.” But for me it was new. We don’t have this in Ukraine. This “sunset agreement” — beautiful, romantic words about a shitty situation in the end, when you say goodbye to your manager because now you are so great, or you find another manager who you think is better, and you leave him in one day. Yesterday you played the gig, and today you tell him: “Now I work with another agency,” or something like that. And so for these situations there is a sunset agreement, which regulates that two years after the collaboration stops, the manager still receives a percentage from all your next gigs, because he already invested a lot of time in you, and you are using — or another agency is using right now — his results of work.

So I guess it’s really fair. And we should make some kind of union of music managers to protect ourselves, you know, like railway station workers, or doctors, teachers. We also have to have this kind of organization, which protects our labour rights and regulates something in this difficult, complicated and so unregulated profession.

AT: Yes, I was thinking that, of course, I totally agree with this. Sometimes I feel that artists come to me and they feel this is super easy. It’s like I have a magic wand, and I can say: “Ah, you go to this festival, you go to this other festival,” something like that. So easy.

And also about what you are saying, for this booking to take place, you have to build trust in yourself first. I mean, sometimes the same artist, with the same dossier, with the same album, will go to a festival and they will not book this artist. And with another person they know and they trust, they will book this artist, of course. So we are in a very little world. Also, people who buy these kinds of acts, they are very expensive. They are thousands of euros. When you book an artist for a festival, it is thousands of euros. So they really need to trust the artist and trust you as the seller. I think to build this takes years. You mentioned before that you came as a new person in Europe. You have to build everything, your reputation also.

And also, of course, you have to create conversation about the artist. You said there are wonderful albums that are never released. And if they were released, you would need to create all the conversation with journalists, with promoters, with everybody. All this is hidden, unseen work. This is not visible, because at the end, what the artist sees is: “Yes, I have a booking, I have so much money from this booking.” But to make this, all those hidden works have to be done.

OK: Yes, you are right. 

AT: I like to be very didactic, because I know musicians will read this, and I try to make them understand this. All this is a very, very important part of it. And as you were explaining, with this manager who has this sunset contract… Sometimes I’ve made investments. I have sent bands to WOMEX, for instance, I have made paper brochures, everything, and they start to get agencies in several regions of Europe. Okay. And then you are restricting the part of Europe where I can work, so then it is not interesting for me at all. So this sunset contract is very reasonable. Thank you for explaining it.

OK: Yeah. Yeah. This really makes things look better for the manager, and protects a little bit. Because I have heard so many stories: a manager or producer gets these musicians from somewhere in Africa, really deep into the tradition, they bring them out to the world, bring them to Europe — I mean, not only from Africa, but let’s say, for example, from Africa, right? — and give them everything and pay for everything. And then they demand to be paid for showcases, or to get money from the promoter just for existing, just because they think that the promoter is a millionaire, or without any respect. And then, as soon as they get another offer, they just go there.

So how can you protect yourself? I mean, maybe even a contract can’t protect you from this kind of thing if people just don’t care. But on the big level, on the high level, you can still at least go and, I mean, again invest in this kind of situation and hire a lawyer, and sue them, or whatever. I don’t know.

AT: Yeah, you can imagine if you do that. You go to court with a musician who is living in Ivory Coast…

OK: For example…

AT: So I think the most important thing here is to respect the others, to measure the investment, in all senses, that the other part made, and just be a fair person. This should be enough, let’s say, and many times I think this is enough.

Recently, a very famous senior folk musician in Spain, Eliseo Parra, said he will retire, he will stop working with his band, only some collaborations, little things. And in the farewell concert, he thanked his manager, his agency, and he said something that I liked. He said that after 30 years they had been working together without any contract.

He felt they didn’t need any contract. They just trusted each other, and they trusted that she was doing the best she could for them. So I thought it was very meaningful. I really liked that, because also I have known them for many years, his agency also. It was very nice.

OK: Yeah. Yeah. This kind of devotion and loyalty is also very often the situation. And I know also agencies which started working with musicians from the very beginning of their career and until the very end. This is very beautiful and I guess it teaches all of us that there can be different situations. It depends very much on people.

AT: Yes. Okay. Ola, we have been talking for almost one hour. 

OK: My God. Are you all right? 

AT: We could talk much more…

And we will. See you Sofia, Ola!!

 

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BRIEF NEWS FROM THE MEDIA, CHARTS AND SISTER PROJECTS 

MEET ME AT

• 27th June: concert by Ali Doğan Gönültaş at the Mawazine Festival in Rabat (Morocco)
• 1st-4th July: A to Jazz + MTC (Music Talks Conference) (Sofia, Bulgaria). As I mentioned in the previous edition, I have been a jury for the showcase of A to Jazz and I will gladly attend to the showcase day, 2nd of July, as well as the rest of the activities of the festival and the conference. Juan Antonio Vázquez will also be attending.
• 14th-17th July: Les suds, à Arles, workshop and concert by Ali Doğan Gönültaş.

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WHO WE ARE AND SISTER PROJECTS 

Mapamundi Música is an agency of management and booking. Learn more here. Check our proposals at our website.

We also offer you our Mundofonías radio show, probably the leader about world music in Spanish language (on 50 stations in 18 countries). We produce the Transglobal World Music Chart, co-founded and co-administrated with Juan Antonio Vázquez with Ángel Romero from WorldMusicCentral.com.

Feel free to request info if you wish. For further information about us, get in touch by email, telephone (+34 676 30 28 82), our website or at our Facebook.