Alvhin Adendorff
A 2020 report by the OECD found that cultural and creative sectors were among the hardest hit by the pandemic. For almost two years, the South African music industry has been battered.
In the age of digital streaming, musicians have had to rely more heavily on live performances for revenue. But live shows were crippled by lockdowns, so royalties have become much more important for artists.
Royalties are the fees companies pay to artists when they use their songs for things like ads and films.
However, there have been recent reports of royalty collection agencies failing to pay artists, which has been ruinous for many.
Recent reporting by GroundUp claims that SAMPRA and RISA (South African collection agencies) have over R400 million and R60 million respectively in unpaid artist royalties and fees.
The problems for musicians do not stop there. In 2020 streaming was estimated to account for over 80% of the recording industry’s revenue. In the same year almost 90% of streams were of the top 10% of artists.
There has been a flood of complaints from artists that they are not paid anywhere near enough by streaming platforms.
The situation does not look promising when it comes to live performances either. Even where lockdowns have been eased, musicians still find themselves struggling to earn a living from live performances.
A number of venues and service providers were unable to survive the lockdowns or have to operate at reduced capacity. Travel restrictions make tours outside of South Africa expensive and hard for musicians and punters to organise.
What this all means is that musicians face an incredibly difficult future. There appears to be little support from collection agencies or streaming platforms, and the live performance landscape is devastated.
Government assistance was supposed to have been provided to artists, but media reports suggest that hundreds of millions in relief funds have been mismanaged.
It is unclear how any kind of recovery of the music industry will take place when the institutions built to support it appear to be either incompetent or indifferent to the devastation.
