I’ve set myself a goal of becoming a better public speaker. I didn’t do a lot of that in my time at Universal Music, and I used to be pretty good at it. Turns out though, public speaking isn’t like riding a bike. In my efforts to improve I keep saying yes to requests, so late last year I spoke on a panel at the Botswana International Music Conference and did an interview with Kaya FM.
The South African charts I’m talking about in the interview are here:
Over the last year, they have become really interesting to look at because the time period is the same (Friday – Friday) but the user bases and price points for these services differ. In a society as dynamic and heterogeneous as South Africa, there’s more to music data than just identifying the hits. These different services highlight what is popular for different communities and consumers, and it’s exactly the kind of feedback that aspiring domestic musicians need.
That’s why we joined BASA – because until now, artists haven’t had free access to this data. Music is the most popular of the Arts, yet there are no official or independent music charts. I did a little more speaking at a BASA event and they published a bit of news about Labs.FM. All in all, I’ve got some things to say, and I’ll be doing more of that over the course of the year.
WROK 