singemonkey wrote
Secondly, that Australian government intervention is seriously intriguing and it would be great to know more about it from articles, but also from musos themselves.
As usual, something like that would be (a) unlikely for a government with many other urgent priorities and (b) more open to abuse in our less lawful country. But some kind of adaptation of the idea is certainly an interesting idea.
This is an old story. The Oz government imposed quotas. So much music played per hour had to have originated from and been produced in Australia. Simple. That meant that Australian artists had a market instead of being crowded out by imported music.
This was often what happened in SA, because it was much cheaper for a local label to pay royalties and buy the tapes and artwork for something that was already a hit overseas than to develop a local act, put them in the studio, design artwork and so on.
Things seem to have gone in different directions. In the mid to late 80s there was a sudden eagerness to promote local talent. Which may have been because increasingly artists from overseas did not want their work distributed in SA and the industry had to have records of SOMETHING to sell and the radio stations had to fill their playlists. Or because exchange rate fluctuations and forex shortages were making the paying for externally sourced material more expensive.
Things were, I think (and I'm open to correction, this is just my understanding) different in the townships. There was a lot more local music being released into that market. People like Mercy Pakhela were making a LOT of money in the late 80s, even though you'd never hear them on Radio 5.
But by the mid 90s there was massive piracy in the townships. Not so much home tapers or people burning CDs on home computers, but con artists making cheap copies, including copies of the original packaging, and selling those at a cut price.
At one point there was a move by ASAMI to educate people and tell them to buy only ASAMI approved goods. Two problems
1) The media they used to spread this message mostly didn't penetrate the townships
2) The con-artists were duplicating the original artwork anyway, so if that had the ASAMI seal on it then that seal ended up on the pirate goods.
