The Composers, Authors and Publishers Association of Africa (Capasso) chief executive officer Jotam Matariro, who is also a renowned music industry executive, was recently in Malawi where he attended the debut Chitoliro Conference for Creative Industries. He shared insights with our BRIAN ITAI on intellectual property rights and how the industry can maximise its digital collection revenue. Excerpts.
Q
: What is your role at Chitoliro Conference for Creative Industries?
A
: I am the chief executive officer for Capasso which is the mechanical rights society in South Africa. We have also set up a hub for multi-territorial licensing on the African continent and we collaborate with societies across the continent, including the Copyright Society of Malawi (Cosoma), to collect and process digital royalties from streaming platforms both audio and video .
Q
: What is your appreciation of the Malawian creative industry?
A
: Mainly, it is emanating from my working relationship with Cosoma. In South Africa, I specialise in the music industry. But what I have realised is that Malawi Government is very supportive to the creative industry in terms of enacting necessary laws. Some of the things that I heard were actually surprising in terms of how long it takes to put the regulations. Out there, we look at how Cosoma is doing things and how they are being supported. It is a model we can [adapt to] support our creatives.
Q
: How would you describe your relationship with Cosoma?
A
: It is cordial. It is mainly business because we have the multi-territorial licence. We guide them to maximise their royalties on digital platforms. We collaborate a lot. We also sit together on Cisac African Committee where I am the vice-chairperson and Malawi is an executive member. Our relationship is very close.
Q
: Is there any particular expertise that you offer to Cosoma to help their operations thrive?
A
: We help how they can maximise digital revenue collection. The biggest issue with digital revenue collection is that you need to collect based on the repertoire that you have. Our job is to notify our creators how the works can be created and also how Cosoma can help create the codes for us to identify the music when it is being used on digital platforms. We can have all the music used, but if we do not have international identifiers, artists end up being paid little.
Q
: What do you think needs to be done for the Malawian creative industry to be vibrant?
A
: This is not just a Malawian problem, but African. There is no registration which regulates streaming platforms operations. I would give an example of YouTube where they decide when to advertise and start paying royalties when the content reaches certain numbers.
Our governments should be able to say if you can’t do this for our creators, like they did in Germany where they told them that if they are not going to pay the creators, they cannot play even the free content. They eventually paid because they wanted to have that platform.
On the African continent, we need to take a certain approach. Africa is where everybody in the creative industry is looking at. We have the market with 1.2 billion people. We are the market that is not yet saturated and this is where the biggest growth is taking place.
In the past two years, the biggest growth has been in Africa. This is the time we need to regulate so that we can benefit from our artists.
