This morning at UCLA there was a great talk by Nagla Rizk from American University of Cairo on "The Music Industry in the Arab World." She's an economist, and wanted to get a grasp on the real structure of the musical economy in Egypt. She and her team interviewed musicians and others involved in the musical economy, both the pop star system and the underground (informal) musicians.

The Arab Music Market is basically an oligopoly, with four firms dominating: Rotana, Alam el Fan, Melody, and Mirage have 85% market share. Then there are smaller players with 13% of market share, and the underground producers with about 2%. The old value chain for Arab Music in Egypt (through the 1980s) looked like this: singer, music company, studio, permits, production. This has changed because of satellite. Now there is a star system that involves industry actively seeking out good looking young people to produce a video clip, send to satellite stations, produce albums, and play weddings. Underground musicians skip the video and satellite distro and jump directlly to an album (sometimes) and paid live performance.

The wedding is a really important part of the culture, and there's a burgeoning culture of live performances. She showed figures of high paid stars getting 40,000 USD to play weddings, smaller bands getting almost 1,000 USD, in a country with GDP per capita of about 4,000 USD (!) There's also collectivity based on kinship solidarity and a strong gift Culture. If someone asks you for a copy of the CD they like, forget copyright: they'll make a copy. In this way, Copyright may actually be disruptive to social norms. In addition, underground bands help each other through peer collaborative production (they'll come and play with each other, back each other up, etc).

She gave really interesting figures on the ratio of performance income to to sale of copyrighted items: 4.5 (for superstars), and 13.2 (for alternative musicians/underground). Basically, the live performance is what matters. [This is great stuff, and would be nice to see this for musicians in other places.] As for the relation to the state, Pop music is seen as mass distraction, while underground music is sometimes repressed as a means of (unwanted by the state) political expression. The legal IPR framework is there in theory, but in practice, there are high piracy rates, weak institutional structures, low enforcement, and corruption. The Domestic music piracy levels: egypt has over 50%, kuwait, lebanon, saudi arabia are 25-50 percent, etc.

But this isn't seen as a problem by musicians locally. All the top stars put their videos and music free on the net. The underground bands also have a commons, which she compares to Brazilian technobrega. There are sites like http://100copies.com making that would like to make free music available on the net; there's an Arab Commons initiative.

At the end of the day, the effective channels of distribution are piracy, live performance, and the net. So copyright materials serve mostly as reputation enhancers. So what should role of copyright be? She suggests a move to formalize the commons, promote flexible IP systems that accomodate commons production, promote alternative business models, and emphasize rewards to creators, not middlemen.