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Music Piracy in West Africa

Category
Seminar
Date
Date
Tuesday 17 March 2015
Category

LUCAS Spring seminar - 'Music Piracy in West Africa: Beyond ‘good’ and ‘bad’?'
With Christiaan De Beukelaer (Lecturer in Cultural Management, Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh and PhD Candidate, School of Media and Communication, University of Leeds)
This paper addresses the struggle to make money from music in Burkina Faso and Ghana. According to most music workers there, making money is difficult largely due to piracy that hampers revenue from legitimate sales. While piracy poses an issue, I develop the argument that there is a need to move beyond the dualistic divide of piracy as ‘bad’ and the so-called legitimate music industries as ‘good’. Such a contrast actually hampers the transformation of the practices of ‘pirates’ into a circuit that channels some of the proceeds back to artists and their producers. This is precisely why I argue that piracy is not in itself the problem, but rather the symptom of an issue that is more elaborate and less easy to resolve than simply outlawing ‘pirates'.