Driving back to the suburbs Tuesday night from an interesting meeting with Will Ward, editor of Arab Media & Society I was tuned in to the dependably entertaining company of the Erin and Zack show on Nile FM who were promoting a DJ Fido hip hop album launch party taking place at Al Sawy Culturewheel right as I was driving by it in Zamalek so I stopped to check it out.

The venue was a real find. It’s built into the foot of a Zamalek bridge underneath one of the city’s primary elevated traffic arteries. There’s an outdoor garden and two auditoriums and the eclectic programming (experimental theater, comedy, music) is on the alternative side.

Unfortunately the talent was less exciting – mostly generic MC’s over generic hip hop beats (Fido in particular needs to give up the RnB crooner pretensions) although there was a young tall scraggy kid from Alexandria that could be groomed into an Egyptian Mike Skinner.

Digging a little deeper into the Egptian musical landscape I came across Ahmed Fahmy, a finalist last year in the British Council‘s International Young Music Entrepreneur of the Year award. He had this to say about the music industry in Egypt:

“Egypt’s music industry is characterised both by negative and positive points.

The negative ones are:

• Copyright – the main issue faced by the Egyptian music industry is the enforcement of copyright law. Although copyright law exists in Egypt, it is not enforced efficiently by the relevant authorities;
• Production quality – Egyptian production is of low quality especially regarding the post production (mastering) and manufacturing stage, on post production: only a few studios are equipped wit the proper mastering equipment and lack the professional operators to use correctly. Producers also still prefer low quality and low cost tape cassettes as their preferred output format;
• Lack of trust between artists and producers with regard to royalty distribution – Egyptian artists do not trust their producer to fairly distribute their royalties on sales. Their agreement is therefore based on a lump sum payment to be paid in advance to the artist. Such arrangement provides little incentive for Egyptian artist to further promote their releases, since they do not gain any royalties from furthering their sales. Furthermore, the producer often offer new talents unfair contracts aimed at monopolising the talent for years to come with little rights left to the artist. This always causes problems between the artists and their producers;
• WWW: The clash between the www and the music industry is a problem faced by music producers s all over the world. Major production companies are still struggling with the challenge of utilising the internet as an effective distribution channel. Their biggest challenge at the moment is how tot deal with the P2P (peer to peer) redistribution of musical content. In Egypt producer are still struggling with pirate website that offer free downloads of their products.
• Music retail outlets: With the exception of the newly opened Virgin megastore, Egypt lacks professional music retail outlets and all is based on street kiosks.

The positive ones are:

• Talent abundance – Egypt is full of great talent waiting to be discovered;
• New positive reforms – in the media sector especially in radio and satellite TV is definitely a plus to further promote and develop local and international talents in a free and relatively independent environment;
• Explosion of underground talents though new live circuits – The last 2 years have marked the launch of a new underground alternative, and bands like West Le Ballad, Iftikasat, and Vibe. Their rise is associated with the rise of alternative cultural venues such as the El Sawy Cultural wheel which plays an important role in showcasing and promoting these bands. The bands are already developing a large fan base and are quickly making their way to main stream. Major brands are now sponsoring alternative band concerts such as the SOS music festival in Maadi, which has already proved to be very successful amongst the youth;
• International concerts – Egypt is being put slowly in the international concerts tour map with major artists planning the Middle East and Egypt as a destination and part of their world tours;
• The opening of the new, Virgin Mega store.

It’s amusing how a Virgin Megastore opening in this part of the world is greeted by cheers from the alternative music scene whereas the major chains would be derided in the US or Europe. In the Middle East (maybe outside of Beirut) Virgin usually does a better job than the local indie players (where they exist) at stocking both mainstream and niche content. It’s just not feasible to compete with their economies of scale.

Copyright is now a universal challenge for the music industry and if anything grass-roots bands like Wust ElBalad have masterfully used the web and social networks to build their fan bases and garner mainstream attention (I plan to write more on Wust ElBalad soon). The quality of local productions do seem to be far lower than international norms

I believe there is tremendous untapped opportunity in the Middle East music scene in general to develop innovative youth music movements. What is needed are fresh music labels, production talent and smart web-distribution strategies.