The South African Music Industry - Trends, Analysis and Questions.

Avril Joffe (CAJ) and Cecile Ambert (Development Works)

Anyone familiar with the struggle over the funding of the ‘arts’ in South Africa and elsewhere in the world will be more than familiar with the phrase ‘art for arts sake’. The cultural industry / value chain approach that has informed much of the DACST (now DAC) approach to the music industry over the last 6 years appears in part to be a reaction to that. In an effort to promote and understand music as an economic sector that generates wealth, employment etc, we appear to have generated a dichotomy in which music is either a commercial product that is the culmination of an ‘industry’s’ efforts or it is an art form, it is cultural.

In the course of preparing this paper it has been interesting to return to these early moments in the efforts to bolster the SA music industry. I will contend in this paper that at the heart of many policy and analytical efforts that have followed from those early days six years ago has been a silence and an ignorance of the way in which the SA music industry is shaped precisely because it is a CULTURAL industry. Those early efforts have contributed substantially to our understanding of the workings of the music industry, but I believe unless the fact of culture is addressed as being core to the development of the music industry, we will be unable to do adequate justice to analysing the trends, the structures and the possibilities that have been unearthed by much of the good work that has been done over the previous 6 years.

To read the full report, download the pdf.