The South African music business according to “Roach”

So, you have written and produced your music, now what?

With a staggering figure of over 250 000 CD releases coming out in 2011 (this equates to over 850 new releases a day and 35 million new mp3 tracks added to the already 27 trillion different releases on the internet currently). How do you stand out of the crowd?

Hilton “Roach” Roth came through to the Modern Music Producer’s course to shed some light on this difficult subject.

Hilton has been involved in many aspects of the South African music industry: he co-founded Krushed and Sorted and the African Dope record Label with Fletcher Beadon, he is a pioneer of the South African electronic music scene, he represents South Africa on the board of The Merlin Network, a global rights agency for independent music and is the creator of Gigham, an online events platform that compiles info on gigs and more from all over the web.

With such vast wealth of Knowledge and experience Hilton was obviously the best choice guest speaker to enlighten the Modern Music Production course students about the Music business as a whole.

He started his talk by giving the students an informative breakdown of what he calls, the Principal Organisational Structures of the Music Industry. Some of the main topics covered were:

• Copyright 101
• Compositions and publishing
• Recording and Releases
• Music 3.0 – realities of the new music industry
• Revenue streams
• Strategy – Building a fan base
• Promoting music online
• Making money from music online
• Power Tools

One area of particular interest is “What is the role of a publisher?” Hilton provided the students with a detailed breakdown of this role and provided them with the info needed to handle publishing their music. He also outlined some of the typical publishing deals available and gave in depth details on publishing rights and revenues.

“build a fan base and the money will follow”

Hilton broke down the value and costs of a physical release from production, manufacture, marketing and promotion to finally sales and distribution. He also had some informative stories and information ranging from operating his original record store to the running of African Dope with his partner Fletch Beadon.

He wrapped up with how Recording Revenue operates and where and how you can make and spend money within this revenue stream. Hilton ended the night off with a golden piece of advice for the students: “build a fan base and the money will follow”

Check out what Hilton is up to by following these links:

http://merlinnetwork.org/home/

http://www.gigham.com/

http://gigham.tumblr.com/

https://www.facebook.com/gigham

The Cape Audio College would like to thank Roach for his extremely interesting and informative talk. Our students came away with a much better understanding of where to go from here.  We hope to see him again soon.

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