right up to and including the standard of living in the townships. Thus, it is every township youth’s dream to “make it” beyond the disadvantages of their environment. However, many find their options limited further given the high cost of tertiary education as compared to what their parents can afford. Add to this that many can’t even get University entrance after finishing high school, you have a pool of black youth in townships left with few options on how to earn a living and continue with their lives. Among the options they are left to pursue after high school, some go after music as a career. Few who make this choice “make it” in the traditional sense, by being signed up by a record label. It is with this background that KasiMP3 fills a certain void. The tale is sprinkled with multiple layers of metaphors making for a rather interesting comparison of the role Constantine played with the Roman Empire with what Mokgethwa is attempting to achieve and has already achieved in part. As Steve Jobs is often quoted, it is often the crazy ones that believe they can change the world that end up changing it. 0. GENE S I S The seed to start KasiMP3 was planted while I was listening to YFM (a South African youth radio station) during May 2009. There were two rappers on the radio station, Riser & Touchline. Both were from kasi (South African slang for the townships) and were performing a freestyle battle. As the freestyle battle got more heated with punch lines flowing, I had an epiphany; “what if there was a website where you could search for local artists and download their music instantly?” Part of the inspiration was because I was a die-hard fan of a South African Hip-Hop group named Skwatta Kamp. As a result, when their first kasi hip-hop album, Khut En Joyn, was released, I went to various music stores to purchase it but to no avail. Disappointment set in. I couldn’t understand why a group that was so popular in the townships didn't have their latest album available in music stores. It became apparent to me that there was a cold war of sorts between independent recording labels and major recording labels. I believe this resulted in the likes of Skwatta Kamp record and their music not being sold in many music stores. “ I n h o c s i g n o v i n c e s ( I n t h i s s i g n y o u w i l l c o n q u e r ) ” – C o n s t a n t i n e T h e G r e a t , 2 7 2 – 3 3 7 A D 1. Download Currency: The KasiMP3 Story Although I had the idea to start a South African online music store, I still had no idea how to build one, especially in a feasible way. International online music stores like Apple’s iTunes were reliant on credit card purchases. I knew, being from kasi, that the majority of people from the townships do not have credit cards. So, building an online music store that was similar to iTunes was out of the question. By accident, I stumbled upon the solution to my online music store idea. I was working as an IT Systems Engineer at one of South Africa’s leading insurance and financial services provider. Whilst working on a system that was integrated with a Vodacom South Africa service, I made an error in the code and the system ended up sending everyone in the development team 500 SMS messages each. It was an embarrassing moment. At the time I was still new in the software development team. It occurred to me at that maybe moment; “Wait a minute, didn’t eXactmobile have a business where they sold ringtones though SMS codes? Then what if a music fan was able to buy a song from my local music store with 5 or 10 South African Rand SMS?” With the two pieces of the puzzle completed, namely “South African music content” and an “R5 per SMS purchasing system”, I began development of the web application for the store, which took the remainder of 2009 to complete. I named the project shipa, which is kasi slang for “store”. I registered a company during December of 2009 and named it Shipa Music. I started software development for the project which took up until the end of January 2010 to complete. The next step, which proved to be the hardest, was to approach music artists and record labels to provide me with the music to sell through the site. At the time I was a fan of a particular DJ from the North West who had a Hip-Hop mix tape compilation. I garnered some courage and called him. He picked up and I introduced myself and my company, to my shock as I was also a fan he responded “Shipa ke dilo mang byanong!??”, (Setswana for “What the hell is Shipa now!??”). Embarrassed and de-motivated with this being my first call, I dropped the line and took time out for about two hours to gather myself before I made the next call. 2. Genesis I contacted many more artists after that incident, both up and coming and popular ones, each time I would get turned down or most would commonly not even dignify me with a response to my emails or messages. This was quite a huge dent on my selfesteem and ego, you have to understand I was coming from being a highly ranked IT systems engineer who had worked for all the top 3 IT companies in SA. It was fast becoming extremely difficult to stomach the constant rejection, added to this is that I was diagnosed with manic depression (bipolar), so at times I would often fall into depression for a couple of days. I was starting to think that perhaps this South African online music store idea is not as good as I thought, and then one day when I was sitting in my lounge watching the SOWETO TV channel, I saw a music video from this artist by the name Kay-E performing a song called “Gcwala Ngathi Ekasi”. Listening to him I got a sense of potential in him, so I found him and I asked him if he could join my project. After getting lost a couple of times driving around SOWETO, we finally met up. I gave him the legal documents, he opened his boot, took out a bag full of DVD’s, he gave me one of them, and said to me this is my first project, I have only been rapping for about two years now, I was extremely inspired by the quality of his hustle, which made me think maybe this thing can happen after all. After the meeting with Kay-E, I began improving my marketing skills as far as approaching artists goes. I was able to acquire a fair amount of songs, I also received some help from Andile “Ma-R” Nkosi of 034 Media, he assisted me a lot in the early stages with marketing Shipa and inviting artists to send us their music. 3. Download Currency: The KasiMP3 Story THE F IRS T COMING 15 March 2010, www.shipa.co.za went online. Within the first few months of going live, the site attracted a fair number of downloads but it struggled to reach a critical mass that I had wanted to take it to the next level. So, in a bid to boost the growth of the music library and visitors to the site I ran a radio advertising campaign on YFM’s popular Hip-Hop show called the “Full Clip”. 4. Download Currency: The KasiMP3 Story Experience teacher all things is the of Julius Caesar Based on the site's historical statistics, we were getting a better reaction from the Hip-Hop community. This is what informed the decision to advertise on a Hip-Hop show. I wasn’t entirely comfortable with this as I have always been worried about building a music library that is Idominated by Hip-Hop music because there was always a risk of dance music and other music genre artists feeling alienated by the platform. The radio advertisements ran for approximately 3 months. They helped with getting the site some attention and a little bit of buzz in the “streets”, but Shipa was still far from achieving the critical mass I needed. At the end of the radio campaign I went back to look at the statistics to restrategize. A massive improvement was needed. The statistics showed that people responded to advertisements, but hardly anyone downloaded the songs. This, I concluded, was due to Shipa having no popular music artists or well known up and coming musicians who people could recognize. The next stage of the strategy was to incorporate some well-known music artists into a radio campaign. I knew from the onset that popular music artists (both from independent and major recording labels) tend to be sensitive when it comes to a brand affiliation. Also, they tend not to trust easily when it comes to money. To counter the potential trust issues, I sent out proposals stating that upon signing over rights to publish some of their music I would pay them an advance for future downloads. I sent these proposals to independent record labels in South Africa, namely Will Of Steel, TS Records, Kalawa Jazmee & Afrotainment. They all ignored and didn’t respond to my proposals. Depression kicked in, I felt defeated after realizing I can’t even pay well known independent record labels to allow us to sell their music. Add to this that there were rumors circulating that record labels were saying they will never allow their artists to sell their music on Shipa because it will “cheapen” their brand. Those rumors shocked me because as a young boy growing up in Tembisa there was always a sense of community, togetherness, amongst us township people. It was becoming apparent to me that this togetherness was non-existent in the South African music industry. As I kept meeting different people in the music industry, I became more and more disillusioned with the South African music industry. This wasn’t a place for a community builder I concluded. Driving to work one day, I heard a Mandoza song on the radio and I loved it, that moment proved to be the trigger for another idea of how to fix the faults in my failing strategy of getting popular artists to sell their music on Shipa. I took the initiative to draft a comprehensive digital downloads campaign for Mandoza’s management, who were impressed and kept me informed about the discussion they are having with the suits at EMI. The discussion eventually reached the global music downloads division within EMI, after their internal meetings and processes they declined the deal due to Shipa not being one of their registered affiliates. More depression, this was pretty much the last straw for me. I knew then that I could never build anything worthwhile with big-name artists. Big music record labels will always hold me back through their power games, I then made a conscious decision to only come up with strategies that only rely on unsigned and independent music artists. 5. The First Coming EXODUS A major strategy re-think was underway and while I was rethinking the move away from working with popular and well known music artists and record labels, I was concerned by some other details within my tactics. I realized that Shipa was a music product and we were paying radio stations to give it exposure. This was a poor tactic I reckoned. The situation needed to be reversed whereby radio stations gave Shipa exposure based on the hype and buzz it generated on the streets. So, as a result, I put up expensive billboard advertisements on a highway hoping to be visible to the young black person on their way to work. Needless to say, they did not visit the site. It turned out; my target user was actually a black student. 6. Download Currency: The KasiMP3 Story With this in mind, I tapped into my previous work experience. I once built an information management system for a micro lending company in South Africa. The system also integrated with an SMS short code that was advertised on a couple of billboards around Pretoria, and the company used it to receive a lot of SMS enquiry messages due to the billboards. This gave me an idea to try out a billboard advertising campaign. It proved to be a big mistake. Also, it turned out to be a waste of money mainly due (in hindsight) to some strategic blunders. Where I got it wrong was that I assumed my target user was the young black person who just started working. THE S E COND COMING As far as financial ROI (Return on Investment) for the billboard advertisements was concerned, there was none. The billboard campaign served a significant purpose. 7. Download Currency: The KasiMP3 Story A week after putting the billboards up, I received a call from a Webmail South Africa. This call planted the seed of “online content and advertising”. I met with Webmail and they presented an opportunity for Shipa to buy advertising on their website. Then I saw how much money they made - light bulb moment. I knew there and then, this was the solution to Shipa’s problems; all of a sudden all the money wasted on billboards was worth it. My first implementation of the online content and advertising business model was by adding a pay per play component to Shipa. I built a BlackBerry app that allowed users to download music for free, the music would only be playable in the app and 10 seconds clips of adverts would play after every 3 songs, allowing me to be able to pay the artists advertising royalties for each time a fan plays the song. For a while, I thought I had finally turned the corner with Shipa, and then one day when I was driving to work I heard the newsreader talking about a new technology startup that had started a service called Spotify. Spotify did everything Shipa was doing, except their service was way better. The last nail on the coffin for Shipa came in the form of MP3Twit. More artists were starting to use MP3Twit instead of Shipa. This, despite not earning money from the download links. I pretty much accepted defeat and I started working on other projects. Depression became worse. I was now becoming desperate for a big idea and it was just not happening. On the other hand, the fact that I was still an employee made me a psychological mess. 8. The Second Coming THRE E Come January 2012, I was working on three ideas. The first, Skopas, was a South African music video website which I was confident would make it big. The second was called Dablap, a South African news aggregator website. While the third idea was to re-build Shipa to imitate MP3twit. The difference this time around would be a revenue generation model. I thought due to the poor performance of the previous versions of Shipa, the brand was now mostly known for failing and poor services, for that reason I decided to rebrand the third version of Shipa, so I named it KasiMP3. At first, I did not think much of KasiMP3, so I focused most of my efforts on Skopas, but irrespective of how I marketed the site, it just did not catch on with the masses. In the last week of January 2012, I decided to put more focus into Dablap. While working on the site my mind started thinking more about how big the KasiMP3 idea can be, eventually, I completed Dablap and I was free to start work on KasiMP3. 9. Download Currency: The KasiMP3 Story I quit my job in December 2011 and left the IT industry in South Africa as an employee for good. I needed to have time alone time in order to find my creative zone again. I started planning how I was going to build KasiMP3 towards the end of January 2012, the idea was that I make something similar to MP3Twit but with a little twist. I built KasiMP3 to allow music artists to create their own accounts online, upload their music and share their download links to their followers and friends on social networks. The biggest flaw that I spotted in other services like MP3Twit was that they basically trained and indirectly prepared their content providers for Apple’s iTunes. In that music artists only used the platform to build up their fan base, and once that’s done they move on from the promotional model to a sales model. I’ve always thought and believed that the fundamentals of building a successful Web 2.0 platform, for example, Facebook and Twitter, revolves around your user being able to grow with your platform. This, in my humble opinion, is what I believe is causing the popularity of Mxit to wane as the years are going by because they dominated high schools, but as soon as the students finished high school they moved into being Facebook and Twitter users. 10. Three REVE LAT ION Further inspiration for KasiMP3 occurred to me when I recollected some statistics when I wrote a business plan for the 2nd version of Shipa in early 2011. When compiling the marketing plan for Shipa in 2011, I had come across a 2009 report from the IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) which estimated that 95% of music downloaded is going to be pirated music. I took a second look at music piracy, and I actually saw it as a solution to the music industry’s problems. I believe the recording industry executives continue to display medieval type of thinking when they observe and monitor music piracy and immediately take action to ban music piracy. They demonized file sharing, and classified it as music piracy and invested insane amounts of money in marketing campaigns that reiterated the message “Piracy is killing the music industry”. Every time you watch TV you would see popular music artists in South Africa regurgitating the same script and line – piracy is killing the music industry. Is music piracy really killing the music industry or has the method just changed? Music sharing culture has been around for as long as music has been around, the piracy we have today is an organic evolution of the music sharing culture that has existed for a long time. Before the advent of the Internet, we’d say “Tebza you have to listen to this new artist who has a song that goes like ta la la la, I’m telling you that’s the hottest song,” and you would try to sing it again as good as the original singer so that your friend believes it’s as good as you say it is. Today, the behavior has evolved to “Tebza you have to listen to this new artist, here is the download link, I’m telling you that’s the hottest song of 2013”. It is in our DNA as humans to communicate, especially to communicate the things we like, and in this age of technology and innovation file sharing has become an extension of that communication. 11. Download Currency: The KasiMP3 Story Thus, I believe, trying to stop music file-sharing is a losing battle against organic change. Also, the recording industry is quite selective in how they view music piracy. They mostly amplify music piracy’s negative impact to sometimes unbelievable proportions forgetting that there are many music artists that were made popular by music piracy. For instance, music genres based on street culture, like Kwaito and Hip-Hop, owe most of their existence to music piracy. When these genres started they suffered intense oppression from the mainstream music industry. The industry continuously refused to take them seriously. They spent a great amount of time being seen as just temporary niche markets that would probably fade away. The pioneers of the street culture influenced genres often speak about how they used to go around from record company to record company trying to get signed, only to end up with rejection. They ended up selling their tapes from their cars, but this was not good enough to compete with mainstream recording labels. Especially their monopoly of broadcast media. The only way these pioneers were to compete was for the street music to broadcast itself.mainstream record labels are forced to respond to the great demand of the new music genre. 12. Revelation “ M u s i c i s a h i g h e r r e v e l a t i o n t h a n a l l w i s d o m a n d p h i l o s o p h y . ” – L u d w i g v a n B e e t h o v e n To survive, they continued to sell their own music. As a result of music piracy, those 1,000 tapes sold went back to the streets, were pirated, and multiplied to 100,000 tapes. The benefit then is that the music is played everywhere, more exposure and then all of a sudden a new music genre is born, a new voice for the youth of the time is born, other neighbouring ghettos and townships hear of this new phenomenon and run to the stores asking for the music genre, then mainstream record labels are forced to respond to the great demand of the new music genre. Supply pre-empts demand in these cases and some become millionaires, greed takes over and everyone becomes an advocate of why file sharing should be banned and how piracy kills the music industry. Isn't it ironic? However, even in present day, the Hip-Hop music fraternity needs to be commended for keeping the mixtape culture alive and allowing the next generation to see good music as something that needs to be shared. Music piracy also helped in growing the popularity of some music genres in South Africa. I remember vividly when I pirated versions of Fruity Loops v4, at the time CD writers were becoming popular. A few months later in 2003, a new phenomenon called Diphala Tsa Pitori looked to have hypnotized most of SA, and due to the bad mastering on most of the songs they could not be playlisted on the radio, but the songs still played everywhere else. Diphala Tsa Pitori is one music genre that was critical to solidifying House music’s place in South Africa because that marked the beginning of an era of locally produced house music to complement the outgoing era of DJs releasing a compilation of international House music songs. The now vibrant House music culture in South Africa also owes its popularity to the pirated copies of Atomix Virtual DJ software that was popular in South Africa at the time. These are just some of the many things that the recording industry is so quick to turn a blind eye to when speaking about piracy. Is music piracy ethical? 13. Download Currency: The KasiMP3 Story I can’t answer that but what I do know is that it was and will always be a constant in the music industry. Logically I then asked myself, “we know the 95% won’t change, so instead of wasting a lot of money and effort trying to get what we can get from the remaining 5%, why not invest in new business models to build around the other 95%”, and that was my biggest lightbulb moment. Music is content. If you look outside the music industry, Facebook and Google are already making a lot of money by giving away content for free, so the challenge was adopting the systems they already have to the music industry. Services like MP3twit were already making money from the advertising space sold on the music artist’s pages. I then asked myself, "why not have an artist incentive programme of some kind since it’s only fair to share a certain portion of the proceeds with the artists, that way artists would want to stay longer.” 14. Revelation ENGINE ERING AN EMP IRE I did some research about how websites make their money from advertising and the common consensus was to use an online Ad service like Google Adsense or South Africa's ADDynamo. While the online Ad services are great at helping you get advertising money, they still paid around R0.005c per view, which was a big problem in the business model. This amount of money was too little to convince a music artist that he can make more money by giving away their songs for free as opposed to selling them. The most obvious way around this was to sell the advertising space myself in order to get a reasonable value from it. Most sites I researched who sold their own advertising received approximately R0.30c from their advertising space per view. Before deciding on the way forward I then tried to establish that if the artist was giving away their song for free, how much would they have to make per free song in order to make the similar amount of money selling their song. I researched about the average amount of money an artist would make from online music sales portals like MTN Loaded, Vodacom Play, iTunes, etc. The amount came to approximately R4.00 per song. 15. Download Currency: The KasiMP3 Story This knowledge, combined with the IFPI report statistics regarding music piracy, led to my conclusion that if the artist were to give away a song for free, then they would need to earn R0.20c per download in order to make as much money as they would make by selling it. I believed I was a complete disaster when it came to sales, so I overlooked the option of directly selling the advertising space to companies. My best option I believed was to somehow find the masked magician in me and turn R0.005c to R0.20c. At first glance, it looked like I was definitely beaten this time around. Then it occurred to me, “hang on, but finance and insurance people inflate money all the time, putting money in a savings account and withdrawing double after some time. Paying R2,000.00 for insurance and getting R200,000 paid out to you, the models already exist, maybe I do not need to find someone who will pay more for the advertising space, I could use the standard Ad services and multiply their money by 40 to get the desired R0.20c per download”. At that moment, 3 years of experience working in the financial services industry building integration systems came to my rescue. My first experience in a financial institution was with an insurance company with offices in Braamfontein, Johannesburg. Their business was based on life insurance products, so I was always fascinated by insurance based business models. Insurance models are built, among others, around two components; the first being the fixed premium the customer pays every month and the second being a pay-out “condition”. These two components are interconnected through statistical formulas that will ensure that the insurance provider makes a profit, most of the time. The premium is always set in a way that whenever the pay-out condition is met the insurance company will pay less cash out for the claims than cash coming in through its policy holders. Let’s take a car insurance model as an example, if for arguments sake the JMPD (Johannesburg Metropolitan Police Department) statistics say that a hundred Volkswagen Golf 1’s out of ten thousand are involved in accidents every month around Johannesburg. 16. Engineering an Empire Add that a single VW Golf 1 is worth approximately R70,000.00, it means the insurance company must have a cash injection of more than R7, 000,000 per month to pay-out all the claims. This means that all the insurance company needs to do is set the premium for Golf owners to R700. Essentially this system allows for a person to pay 1 month premium of R700 and get R70, 000 in cash return in the same month, when I thought of this point, I immediately had another critical light bulb moment. The Insurance model was a true blessing because it fits the music industry even better than the intended industry. The music industry comprises of two groupings of artists; the first grouping is artists who are less than 1% of the industry, the mainstream artist who wants to cash in on their popularity and fan-base, the second grouping is the upcoming artist and these form 99% of the music industry, their primary objective is to build a fan-base, gain some popularity and graduate to mainstream. The two groupings complement each other because the upcoming artists, since they don’t have a large fan-base, will get 100 downloads there and there but collectively when you combine the 10s and 100s downloads from upcoming artists, due to the large scope of music the system pushes 50 times the advertising you can push with a collective of mainstream artists. On the contrary the mainstream artists have millions of fans, but since they are a small collective they don’t have enough music to engage the fans on monthly basis, so what will happen is their fans would then look around the site for other artists to give a try while still waiting for the next superstar release. As you can see that mechanics make for a complete and balanced ecosystem cycle that ensures every artist gets what he needs to move to the next step of his evolution. The classification of an upcoming and a mainstream artist in the system is done through the gross download count of an artist’s songs. I had initially set the “divider download count” to 10,000, but I felt it was too high for most artists, especially since it’s a new business model. I changed the legal agreement on the website to say artists would only be paid their royalties when they have reached a minimum of 5,000 downloads. This type of a payout system is very common amongst Ad services, whereby you can only claim a certain minimum pay-out. 17, Download Currency: The KasiMP3 Story This model is often used to manage administrative costs, because a company would lose money if it had to pay everyone who wants to claim R10.00, instead of waiting until they earn something like R1,000.00. I also used this system for the same reasons, including the critical purpose of balancing the ecosystem. Now that I finally had the business model to build from, I began the software engineering part of the KasiMP3.co.za project. It took me approximately fourteen days to get the beta version done and ready to be used. On 12 February 2012, KasiMP3.co.za went live. The new system was launched as a completely different entity from the second version of Shipa, I even had no music available on the server. So I then started the process of sending e-mail messages to all the users who were selling their music in the older version, Shipa, proposing the new business model and the response was good. After monitoring usage of the system after a week, I was ready to go big. The next step – marketing with the aim of reaching critical mass. This was to prove not to be too difficult as throughout the evolution of Shipa I had accumulated a vast amount of intellectual property especially around the promotion of products online. One of those online marketing systems I developed marketing to my target market which is the youth. This automated system involved sending messages to those who had just written their last high school exams, known as matric exams in South Africa, and the list in tabular form was provided by the SA Department Of Education (now known as the Department of Basic Education). It took two automated online marketing systems to help KasiMP3 reach critical mass, one of them was a Twitter bot which used Twitter’s API (Application Programming Interface). The Twitter bot was successful, but I was unable to reach any critical mass because the users it engaged with and attracted were scattered all around the world. I had a large number of registered users but struggled to establish a sense of community on the platform. 18. Engineering an Empire After Twitter, I turned to Facebook. Facebook has over time developed some hard to beat spam detection algorithms, so initially, I didn’t see much hope in using it as an online promotional option. Out of pure coincidence, I noticed that in early 2012 Facebook underwent a lot of technical changes on their core components, so since the components were still in beta, Facebook lowered the guard for their spam detectors, as a result, I could possibly inbox 2,500 Facebook users whom I’m not friends with. With the new window of opportunity having become available on Facebook, I acted quickly to implement the next phase of promoting KasiMP3. Even though KasiMP3 is a Johannesburg based business, my experience with the other versions of Shipa dictated that I build-up the momentum from outside (of Johannesburg) and then come back in. This decision was informed by my observation that Johannesburg (and Gauteng to an extent) is an area that experienced some the most notable cases of racism during Apartheid, as such I observed that there was lurking around in Gauteng a sub-conscious black self-hate mentality, possibly the highest occurrence in South Africa. Black self-hate in Gauteng has a potential of being de-motivating and makes it hard to start a creative project targeted at black youth. Excessive and vulgar occurrences of hating and jealousy are always flying around. Also, another observation I made, because of Apartheid, South African black people, in general, had been psychologically and sub-consciously trained to wait for the proverbial white man to invent things for them. The Gauteng people think they know it all and I did not see it as my place to prove them otherwise, all I knew was that I needed a space where I can be afforded the creative freedom to showcase my work. Shipa received lots of support from the Eastern Cape and North West provinces during its time, so logically the promotion of KasiMP3 started with the Eastern Cape. The other aspect I had to consider when promoting KasiMP3 was which music genre I was going to be focussing my Facebook promotion on. From my experience with marketing Shipa, I noticed music stores like Traxsource and Afrodesiamp3, even if they were not near being as efficient as they were made out to be, but they had a lot of hype around the house music community. So, as a result, house music producers did not seem in the mood to support another new platform. 19. Download Currency: The KasiMP3 Story The first version of Shipa was targeted at the kwaito music community, but it turned out they don’t value technology as much as they should to survive in this new world, so I found it hard to propose the value of what I’m doing. The only choice I found myself left with was the Hip-Hop community. It turned out that what I’m trying to do with KasiMP3 correlates with what the hip-hop community is trying to do with the genre. Next stage of the Facebook marketing tactic, I knew music artists are Facebook friends with a lot of other music artists from the same province, so I opened Facebook friends’ lists of Eastern Cape Hip-Hop artists that I know. I underwent a worthwhile yet tedious process of manually going through every friend’s profile, send a message promoting KasiMP3 to everyone who specified “Rapping” in their Facebook biographies. I would do that 2,500 times for each province a day. By the time I coincidence with Gauteng, KasiMP3 had over 3,000 registered music artists and what happened after that was a kasi boy’s dream come true. KasiMP3 passed critical mass, the download links were everywhere, fans told other fans, artists told other artists. I finally did it! I was in my zone and I was already thinking of big things to do with the platform. March 2012 I looked at the stats and I noticed that most of the visits were from mobile phones, so I made a decision on the spot to build the site from mobile first. Two months from implementing that decision, it paid dividends. It felt like KasiMP3 was going viral again for the second time, which was a great milestone in better understanding my consumer. KasiMP3 quickly grew to 5,000 registered artists and at that time I was using AD Dynamo’s ad service, who did not have that many mobile advertisers. As a result of the explosive growth in mobile usage, the business model became very unstable. The stabilization of the model required floating cash to make sure royalties are always paid on time while seeking an adequate mobile advertising service. Off I went to the SA National Youth Development Agency (NYDA) to apply for financial assistance, and to my shock, my application was rejected. 20. Engineering an Empire I could not believe the NYDA would refuse to offer assistance to a platform supporting 5,000 young South Africa musicians, in my mind if there was ever an initiative where the government could assist the youth it was through the platform. I was so heartbroken by the decision because I could not comprehend how the government became cold enough to reject 5,000 young artists, especially since I also provided them with my track record to illustrate that I know what I’m doing. I contested the decision only to be ignored. I put the NYDA rejection behind me; I swallowed my pride and went back to work in IT to work as a contractor, Systems Engineer. For a couple of months I worked on KasiMP3 during weekends and after hours, fortunately, the business model happened to be so well done that the little money I made from the platform, I could support it so well through the growth. Eventually, I was able to develop other revenue generation model that allowed the platform to sustain itself, enough for me to quit my job again and work fulltime on KasiMP3. By the end of November 2012 KasiMP3 had the following statistics for that month: • 5,6 million Page Views • 260,000 Unique Visitors (November 2012) • 34,400 Registered Artists • 2.8M Downloads • 90% Mobile Views • 10% Web Views 21. Download Currency: The KasiMP3 Story COLD WAR KasiMP3 was enjoying healthy growth. Unfortunately, some people in the mainstream music industry in South Africa were harboring negative emotions towards the platform. I was not aware of this for a long time because my plan was to eventually integrate KasiMP3 with the mainstream music industry. I saw great value in the mainstream industry’s vast intellectual property because amongst many things the major recording labels knew the art of making superstars, but to their detriment, they just did not see a future made of both of us. Coming from the IT industry, I had witnessed how the world changed in response to the concept of Free & Open Source Software (FOSS), as a result, I felt some sympathy for the mainstream music industry for not understanding the role of technology and it disrupting their traditional business models. The first time I got a sense of how the mainstream music industry in South Africa was thinking in relation to the success of KasiMP3, was when I paid a visit to one of the SA Hip-Hop Awards workshops. I thought it was all love when I first introduced the platform to the crowd, but things unexpectedly became intense with other artists going as far as vowing to never let their music to be published on the platform. They were all happy to explain to me how “trashy” the product is and how we are apparently killing the music industry. I was insulted by the remarks. For a while, the remarks lingered on in my mind, but I have realized that one will run into a lot of what I see as stupid people, and stupid people say stupid things all the time, so I just forgave them, pretended like nothing happened and moved on. Incidents like this happened quite a lot and often, two months later after an artist makes such a negative remark, the same music artist would quietly create a KasiMP3 account and upload their songs as if nothing happened. 22. Download Currency: The KasiMP3 Story 23. Cold War I’m never vengeful because I have come to observe that it is mostly the black selfhate talking. My second run-in with the mainstream music industry people in South Africa, related to KasiMP3, proved to be the most explosive. It started with an e-mail from a person named Nic Burger. The e-mail read: “Please remove this track immediately: http://KasiMP3.co.za/s/aUx This is copyright of Soul Candi Records. Failure to remove this will result in legal steps with our business affairs as well as RISA”. I was taken aback by the threat of legal action, it also annoyed me because on a regular and daily basis we remove illegal uploads to KasiMP3. I responded: “Don’t you think it’s a little bit tasteless to introduce yourself with threats of legal action like this, but enough with the negativity as this industry needs both of our expertise to survive. We do not have friends who work for Soul Candi Records, so do you mind explaining to me in greater detail the copyright infringed by DJ Vibes.” I tend to be extreme with my responses at times, Nic then responded: “Please note I'm CC'ing in Agnus Rheeder from RISA Anti-Piracy in on this email to take this matter further. Soul Candi Records owns the rights to ORNETTE - Crazy and we in no way gave KasiMP3 or "DJ Vibes" permission to remix this record or offer it for sale and download on KasiMP3 or any other site for that matter. We have already removed his ZippyShare and various other downloads offered. Angus please can we log an official complaint against KASIMP3 for offering ORNETTE - Crazy (DJ Vibes Remix) for sale. Please let me know any official paperwork required to take this matter further. Infringing item : http://KasiMP3.co.za/s/aUx“ After that exchange, the “power games” officially began. The e-mails went from discussing a potential illegal remix to discussing KasiMP3 being a "township version” of The Pirate Bay. Graeme Gilfillan even said: 24. Download Currency: The KasiMP3 Story “A look at Shipa Music’s KasiMP3.co.za site……. is to take a look at a host of illegal and infringing activity. Very sad and unnecessary” The matter kept on being escalated, at times it felt like having the whole of SA’s mainstream music industry was coming down on KasiMP3, demanding the shutdown of the platform. It turned into a music industry politics game, I went to the extent of offering RISA (Recording Industry of South Africa) an administrative console on KasiMP3, this in a bid to enable them to have the oversight role to delete whatever song they wanted to delete. Instead, they opted to fight to what I believe was a fight to get the platform killed. I asked myself “What’s your agenda RISA? We offered you the godly administrative rights on our platform, something YouTube and SoundCloud will never let you have. Yet you seek the death of us, regardless of the fact that 99% of our downloads are legal, or maybe you need to eliminate all threats to the monopoly by any means necessary, even if 33,400 independent artists are standing in the way then so be it. After all, strategically it’s better to keep them hungry so that when one of your masters offers them a slave contract they are in the mood to accept anything. I was angry. E-mails about how we are running an illegal operation eventually reached our hosting provider, Hetzner South Africa. Hetzner then gave me a call requiring details of our operations. I forwarded the required details to prove we are a legal operation, I offered to provide logs of all the illegal songs we have been deleting since we went online. Hetzner was happy with the details and agreed there is nothing wrong with our operations and the complaint was closed. A week later, on 28 December 2012 I the received a call from Hetzner saying that their parent company from Germany where the files are being hosted don’t want to host KasiMP3 anymore. The reason they gave was that file sharing websites were illegal in Germany. 25. Cold War I suspected foul play by RISA. Hetzner told us they will be happy to host KasiMP3 in their South Africa based data center, but unfortunately, the price of local bandwidth was outrageous for us. So, the only option at the time was to shut down KasiMP3 while looking for an alternative hosting provider. 28 February 2013, KasiMP3 came back online after 2 months offline. The vision is bigger. Initially, I was building KasiMP3 to be a peripheral tool for the music industry, but since the music industry would rather see the death of our platform, the only objective was for us as the KasiMP3 community to becoming the music industry itself. 26. Download Currency: The KasiMP3 Story THE GREAT I believe, the most powerful entity in the world is people. The second most powerful entity is ideals because they are the core of what influences people. The third most powerful entity is systems because they ensure that ideals reach their intended target. The two most dominant classifications of systems are government and religious systems. For me, what made the Roman Empire legendary is that they pioneered the best systems for each of the classifications, namely the religion of Christianity and the government system known as the Republic. The Christianity and the Republic systems continue to dominate the modern day. Both have been pretty much uncontested until the dawn of the information technology era, post the industrial age. Technology has played a significant role in weakening most religious systems, and as an indirect result, it has empowered Republic system. For a lengthy period of time the world was run by politicians and aristocrats, then as technology continued to grow and evolve, it gave birth to mass media. “ L i b e r i s m e n t i b u s - o m n e s d e o s s u o s ( W i t h f r e e m i n d s — a l l a r e t o w o r s h i p t h e i r g o d s ) ” – C o n s t a n t i n e T h e G r e a t , 2 7 2 – 3 3 7 A D 27. Download Currency: The KasiMP3 Story Mass media opened up a new world altogether as it continued to grow in dominance, it began turning ordinary actors and musicians into stars, and then it continued changing these stars into superstars. A symbiotic relationship ensued for some time between the stars and mass media, and eventually, out of this symbiotic relationship, was born an explosive power called “Popular Culture”. Pop Culture, as it is known, has an extreme and targeted influence on the impressionable youth, and it is unmatched in every regard when compared to the religious and republic systems. However, irrespective of Pop Culture’s rise to prominence, the world still revolves around Pastors, Rabbis, Prophets, and Politicians simply because there is no system that provides control on the superstar’s influence. Pop Culture today is more like Christianity before Constantine the Great put the engineering brilliance and might of the Roman Empire behind it. Before him, Christianity was just a niche religious belief that had a lot of heart and no systems to impose itself upon the world. The other critical correlation between the earlier form of the Christian Religion and the current Pop Culture is that everyone who joined Christianity just wanted to be disciples of Jesus Christ, but hardly anyone came in with an engineering mind that was later added by Constantine The Great. The same thing is happening with the entertainment industry, everybody just wants to be superstars, and even people who manage superstars want to become superstar managers, engineering qualities are virtually non-existent. I believe that’s what I’m trying to do and that’s my purpose. I’m here and hope to fill that Constantine void in the music industry. The most dominant controller of Pop Culture is the music industry, but in its prime, the global revenue made by the music industry per annum was $38 billion. The revenue even dropped to a lower amount of $16.5 billion for the year of 2012. If the music industry had a system for managing Pop Culture, it could have easily competed for part of the $529.5 billion global Ad spending for 2012. Google alone as a company made $43.69 billion in advertising revenue for 2012, which embarrassing enough is 2 times what the whole music industry made in revenue. 28. The Great That’s even more than what the industry made at its prime. Yet Google’s power is nowhere near the influence superstars have over the world, all Google has is a simple search service and an unprecedented level of systems engineering. Just imagine the advertising revenue you could pull if you could have Google’s level of systems engineering in a music industry system that controls Pop Culture. KasiMP3 is the infant stages of such a system.