Copyright
Music piracy has acquired semi legal status in Cameroon, with burnt copies of albums on display in various markets countrywide. This has been going on for so long most people aren’t even aware that they are buying pirated CDs.
Also,if one departs from the premise that music piracy is the copying and distribution of music without consent from the copyright-holder, an overwhelming number of Cameroonians can be indicted for committing a crime they are not aware of.
Every day, thousands of songs by Cameroonian artists (as well as songs from elsewhere) are downloaded in mp3 format from sites like Dilandau.com, YouTube, Waptrick.com, and others, with disregard to copyright laws.
Some people even go to the extent of setting up makeshift kiosks on the sidewalk where they sell songs for as little as 200 cfa. With all these antecedents in place, it was only a matter of time before the situation, which was mostly limited to random unrelated songs, was bound to change.
Early in May this year, Jovi (an innovative Cameroonian rapper and producer who’s been profiled by Okayafrica and Jeune Afrique) launched a social media campaign which asked fans to change their profile pictures to yellow to show support for his upcoming second album, Mboko God. The 31-year-old rose to prominence with the single “Don 4 Kwat”, a track off his 2012 debut LP, HIV, which Kangsen Feka Wakai described in Bakwa magazine as “the long awaited arrival of a self-assured emcee very conscious of his abilities, the vacuum in the genre, his audience’s expectations, and the right dose of hustle to assert his place.”
Jovi, a 2015 MTV Africa Music Award-nominee, has always been at the forefront of innovative music packaging and his label, New Bell Music, usually seeks novel ways of making the most of social media and the internet.
Prior to the yellow campaign, Jovi had started #EtP8Koi on Twitter, a hashtag created to promote one of his singles which became so popular Pannelle & Co ranked it among the most used hashtags by Cameroonians on Twitter in 2014. Thus, ahead of the release of Mboko God, slated for May 20, it was announced that the album could be preordered from May 12 via the online store Jumia (a first in Cameroonian music retail).
Nothing prepared Cameroonians for what happened on May 20. A storm broke out on Twitter that day (and continued for the rest of the week), as people complained about the late delivery of Jovi’s album, which they’d already preordered.
This trend gave way to #MbokoLeak and the album was illegally uploaded online and shared privately by email and via social media. This marked a new era in the evolution of piracy in Cameroon, and made Mboko God the fastest (and first) album by a major Cameroon-based musician to be leaked on the internet.
#MbokoLeak highlights the birth of a new kind of consciousness in Cameroonian piracy— uploading copyrighted material online for free download because one sees no need to pay for it, a phenomenon which is described as the ‘culture of free.’ Technically, the album wasn’t leaked, it was just pirated. ‘Leak’ presupposes that the album is made available illegally before its official release date, while this leak was made available online for illegal download after the album’s release.
Reactions on the internet, especially on Twitter, were varied but fell into three main groups: those who were disappointed that the album was leaked because of the amount of work and energy invested in the process of creating it; those who boasted about the fact that they’d downloaded it for free (and one of them created #MoiPasPayerPourCa); and, finally, those who wanted to know where they could find and download the leaked album.
An anonymous source revealed that on the day of the album’s release, there were two methods one could use to download a pirated version: the first was via a direct download link and the second was through a shared private email containing a Dropbox link. Izane Gaetan, a techie with a huge online presence, opined that the album was leaked for two reasons: firstly, “for the sake of sharing, and secondly, to see what would happen if Jovi’s album was pirated, given his loudmouth.” This was corroborated by another source who believes the album was leaked by someone who was disappointed by Jovi’s altercation with Sadrak, a member of the hip-hop crew Negrissim’.
Further down the rabbit hole, the trail led to a Cameroonian student living in France. Via a private Twitter interview, Frank L said that he shared the album via Dropbox at about 6:45 pm (Central European Time) on May 20, but this was several hours after another person had already uploaded the album online such that it could be downloaded via a direct download link on a site with a dot co.nz domain name. Unfortunately, sources were less than forthcoming on the source and brain behind that first upload.
Frank said that he didn’t download the pirated version, but bought his copy on Bandcamp and decided to share it. He shared it out of “sudden impulse, when Nelson Simo asked on Twitter if anybody had the album.” Frank then realized that his Twitter timeline was flooded with people who wanted to buy the album, but also wanted to be sure about the quality, and “some of them had already ordered the album on Jumia.”
Frank further stated that he believes in the principle that an album has to please and people will buy it. He also said that he prefers listening to albums, either by streaming them or through pirate websites, before buying them, an approach he used with J Cole’s 2014 Forest Hills Drive, Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly and D’Angelo’s Black Messiah. Jovi’s Mboko God was the only album he bought this year without having had a prior listen, so he wanted to save his friends from the same experience.
To some extent, Jumia, the online store responsible for the distribution of Jovi’s Mboko God album, had a part to play in the leak because of the delayed deliveries. In a context where the hip-hop community was already hyped up by the highly-anticipated album, this created a vacuum in demand, which was filled by piracy.
Free culture as an ethic
In the course of researching and writing this article, another upload of Mboko God popped up on May 27. This time, it was a YouTube channel, which uploaded all 12 songs of the album. In the process of checking out the songs and the comments, YouTube suggested yet another version of the album, which had been uploaded by someone with the initials S.L. on that same day.
In an article for The New York Times titled “On the Trail of an Online Pirate”, tech reporter Jenna Wortham reminisces about her profile of Hana Beshara, the founder of NinjaVideo, a now-defunct pirate streaming website. Wortham writes that she came of age “before Netflix/Hulu/iTunes were in full effect and when illegal streaming networks like Napster, Demonoid and Kazaa were proto-social networks. Talking about the music you were downloading was an icebreaker; it was part of the social fabric in high school and college.”
It is, therefore, not difficult to figure out that, like Frank, those involved in the illegal sharing of Jovi’s album consider “free culture as an ethic”, as claimed by Zac Shaw in his article titled “In Defense of Free Music“. They belong to an ever-widening circle of music consumers for whom words like ‘vinyl’ and ‘CD’ mean nothing, but ‘streaming’ and ‘free sharing’ mean everything. This culture enables some people to have access to content which would have been otherwise unavailable to them.
Jovi has the unenviable (or enviable, depending on the stance) position of being “patient zero of digital music piracy” in Cameroon, and the various pirated versions of his album which emerged online within a week of the album’s release hint at the high demand for his music in Cameroon and beyond.
In many cases, high levels of piracy result in a cultural buzz, and if one looks away for just a few seconds from the artist’s financial loss, one will realize that piracy is also the result of an artist’s immense popularity.
