Africa Gets MTV – But Will the Continent’s Musicians Benefit

International Herald Tribune – February 25, 2005

Sharon LaFraniere – N.Y. Times

 

 

JOHANNESBURG For as long as anyone can remember, it has taken a rare stroke of luck for an African recording artist to be heard outside Africa.

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Pino di Benedetto, the marketing director for EMI Africa, a major recording company here, remembered how the South African rock band Watershed got the cold shoulder throughout Europe until one German disc jockey named Gregor happened to hear its lyrical hit single "Indigo Girl" on the radio while vacationing in South Africa in 2000.

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He picked up the CD at a store, packed it in his suitcase and played it on his station, SWR3, when he got home to Stuttgart.

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"Indigo Girl" hit Germany's Top 10 chart, di Benedetto said. "There is a lot of music that comes out of Africa that would be easily marketable in the States and in Europe," he said. "Nobody gives us a chance. We just are not seen as hitmakers."

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Until now, perhaps. This week, in a snazzy nightclub in Sandton, a well-heeled suburb outside Johannesburg, MTV opened its first local music channel in Africa, bringing one of the world's best-known consumer brands and its global dominance of music television to one of the few remaining untouched markets.

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For viewers in 48 nations in sub-Saharan Africa, the opening belatedly offers what young music fans in other nations have long watched on MTV's 43 other music channels - their favorite local artists, showcased in a slick, fast-paced music-video format with contests, music news, viewer-request lines and behind-the-scenes features.

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For the continent's artists - those bands with talent and drive but lacking a road map out of Africa or even out of their own country - the channel, called MTV Base, could offer the kind of break they longed for, says Bill Roedy, president of MTV Networks International.

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The best of those artists, he said, might be able to jump from the local channel to other MTV channels around the world, giving them the global exposure that had eluded all but a few African musicians.

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"We are looking to Africa to be a huge contributor," he said in a telephone interview from London. "It is going to enrich our channels around the world. We work very hard to develop local artists. It is something we passionately believe in. It's not just a natural evolution. It's a commitment."

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Many would snicker at that, arguing that MTV's ubiquity these days - the seamless broadcasts of Outkast in Pskov, or Maroon 5 in Hokkaido - fosters cultural homogeneity. Rather than promoting indigenous, original music, they say, MTV's global reach simply encourages foreign artists to mimic the American formats that the mass market seems to crave.

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To its critics, MTV is the classic example of what President Jacques Chirac of France called the threat of a worldwide invasion of American pop culture. If unchecked, Chirac warned in Hanoi in October, "all other countries would be stifled to the benefit of American culture."

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Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University, said: "MTV represents a wing of American youth culture that has a following - and also arouses contempt and loathing."

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Still, more than a few African artists laboring in impoverished anonymity see MTV as a possible ticket to fame. Indeed, their hope is that the trend will go in the opposite direction - that MTV will help Africa export its music to the United States.

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Other markets are crucial because Africa's own market is minuscule, amounting to less than 1 percent of global music sales, industry studies show. If a South African recording artist sells 50,000 copies, it's a platinum record. "In terms of the United States, that's a joke," said David du Plessis, general manager for the music industry's trade association, the Recording Industry of South Africa.

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He blames piracy problems, in part, for crippling the industry.

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How to break out of Africa is the perennial question here. Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the winner of two Grammy awards, was virtually unknown outside Africa until the group collaborated with Paul Simon on his groundbreaking "Graceland" album, which made so-called world music a phenomenon among American artists.

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Artists all over the world complain there is no room for them in a market dominated by Americans and Europeans, said Steve Harris, Africa's international marketing director for the recording company Universal South Africa.

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The hope, he said, is that MTV would give talented African artists a springboard to local fame, the prerequisite for international interest. "In Brazil, MTV really did create a demand and help music at the local level," he said.

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MTV Base was a long time coming. The network's first music channel made its debut in the United States in 1981, and its first international channel began in Europe six years later. In the ensuing 18 years, MTV's local channels had spread almost everywhere except Africa, which until now had been offered only MTV's European channel.

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It is easy to understand why: In much of the continent, televisions are only slightly more common than ice rinks. Americans own one television set for every one person, according to United Nations surveys. Africans own one for every 16. Pay television, MTV's platform in Africa, is the staple of barrooms, not the one-or-two-room block urban homes where millions of young Africans live.

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MTV now reaches 411 million homes worldwide, counting Nickelodeon and its various other channels. In Africa, MTV will add 1.3 million subscribers, more than two-thirds of them in South Africa, according to DS-TV, the satellite broadcasting service. Some industry experts question how much that viewership can grow.

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"Considering the average household income, I don't believe you are going to see millions of people rush out and buy a decoder just because MTV is available," du Plessis said.

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Still, the continent is home to nearly 900 million people, more than a third of whom are between the ages of 15 and 34, MTV's target audience. Now that it is more politically stable and on a path toward economic growth, Roedy says, Africa fits in MTV's plan to span the globe.

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Eighty-one percent of MTV's viewers live outside the United States, but they still account for only 16 percent of MTV's revenues.

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Unlike Britain, where MTV is fighting hard to ward off challengers, its competition in Africa is confined to dead-of-the-night music fillers on free television stations and to Channel O, a pay television channel that is devoted to local music but lacks MTV's name recognition or glittering appeal.

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Even South Africa's radio stations have had to be forced to play more local music. Outraged at broadcasters' slavish devotion to American and European music, musicians and record companies demanded that local songs be given one-fifth of the music airtime on the nation's radio stations. State regulators agreed, instituting the quota in 1997.

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Lebo Mathosa, a Johannesburg singer with a powerful voice and provocative dance style reminiscent of Tina Turner, thrilled the hip, racially mixed crowd invited to celebrate MTV's new channel with a live performance that cellphone cameras were snapping wildly. Like most popular artists here, she said that she was starved for broader outlets, especially those with global reach.

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Roedy says that local programmers at the network's other channels decide on their own what songs in MTV's international inventory merit airtime. But having seen Latin American artists take off in the mid-1990s, he said, he had high hopes for the musical form of kwaito, as well as the Zulu form of hip-hop and other distinctly African genres.

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Initially, Roedy said, MTV's new channel would devote 30 percent of its airtime to local music, and programming would be coordinated out of London. But after the channel established itself, local and international music would divide the airtime 50-50. By the end of next year, the channel's entire operation would be out of Africa, an MTV spokesperson said.

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Roedy says the individual personalities of its local channels are the secret of MTV's dominance of the world market. MTV Indonesia includes a daily call to prayer for its Islamic audience; MTV Italy offers food programs; MTV Japan has a sharp, techy edge.

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And MTV Africa? "Good question," he said. "It will evolve."