Imagine being able to hear many kinds of Caribbean music on demand, without busting your budget or selling out to the music pirates. Whether you’re in the mood for a little old school Jamaican dub, or hot merengue from the Dominican Republic, or vintage calypso by Kitch, or the hottest new soca hits, or even something meditative and spiritual, suppose you could just click on an app on your smartphone to access a whole new experience of your own regional music?
That’s the dream of two of T&T’s avid music collectors, Don Carrington and Simeon Sandiford, and their team, who are all business partners in Caziq.
Caziq is the newly born streaming platform for One Caribbean Voice which aims to make all kinds of Caribbean musical content easily available via a mobile application. And like all newborns, it’s a work in progress.
Come February, the Caziq app should be available to all the public via the Google Play and the Apple App Store. But for now, the app has just been released to a few selected music industry experts and aficionados for them to experience, enjoy, and give their feedback, said Carrington in a Guardian interview last week.
The idea is that anyone with a broadband internet connection can have convenient, affordable access to a wide range of Caribbean music.
The business model is focussing on streaming, with a download feature to be added later, said Carrington. Interested people can sample a little of the music right now via the Caziq website at www.caziq.com. It is all of a high sound quality—streams will be in high bitrate mp3, as well as dedicated high-resolution lossless audio formats.
When it’s fully operational, you will be able to listen to music via Caziq either free—via curated streams with some advertising or on a subscription basis—which will give you unlimited, ad-free listening access to all music files, and lets you make your own playlists. The monthly subscription fee will be US$5.99, said Carrington.
On content, and copyright
Much of the music available on Caziq right now is indigenous music from the three biggest English-speaking islands: T&T, Barbados and Jamaica. This includes gospel, soca, calypso, and parang. Thanks to contributions from Simeon Sandiford and Sanch Electronix Ltd, the options also include what is perhaps the world’s largest archive of steelpan music. There is also a small amount of Cuban music.
There are plans to expand this range of content—in terms of regional genres as well as the variety of artistes—as quickly as the intellectual property rights for different artistes and countries can be negotiated, said Carrington.
“The idea has been about three years in the making,” Carrington said. Just over a year of that time was spent in developing the actual Caziq mobile application, while most of the time was spent on the intellectual property rights negotiations.
This process of rights negotiations has been the thorniest part of making the regional music streaming idea into a reality, said Carrington.
“One of the major issues with regard to music content in the Caribbean is how fragmented the entire system is. Even in Trinidad, it’s very fragmented,” said Carrington.
“Many people say that we do not have a music industry in T&T, what we have is a kind of a hustle. And the reason they say that is because there is no structure in place. So, for example, if you wanted to access content in North America or Europe, you only have to go to a few places, and you can get 90 per cent of the mainstream content. That’s because they have large record companies and copyright management organisations to deal with those issues,” explained Carrington.
Meanwhile, here in the Caribbean, we have small entities making music, usually one-man or small operations, and many of our artistes are not effectively represented by a conveniently centralised, well organised, businesslike intellectual rights body, he said. “So to bring an archive together means literally going to all of these people,” said Carrington.
Indeed, when Caziq first approached them, even our own Copyright Music Organisation of T&T (COTT) had not yet developed a licence arrangement to govern the streaming of music as a business. Caziq is working with them to create one, said Carrington. He observed:
“We have a lot of work to do to build the structure for music to flourish here as a business. Too many people (in T&T) don’t fully understand what is legally required, what artistes’ rights are, and like many other laws in T&T, copyright laws here are not fully enforced. Remember, for any given song, you not only have author/composer rights, but also sound recording rights...and COTT only basically manages author/composer rights.”
Carrington mentioned the Association of Caribbean Copyright Societies (ACCS) and said Caziq is now in the final stages of obtaining a regional license through this body, which is another necessary step for gaining rights to stream a wider range of music and artistes.
Both Carrington and Sandiford are committed, however, to doing all the necessary legal legwork to expand Caziq into a dynamic, unique source for Caribbean music.
Singer, dentist, DJ...and now,
music businessman
Simeon “Sanch” Sandiford is well known in local music industry circles as the managing director of Sanch Electronix Ltd, which offers services including music recording, mixing, editing, and retail sales of local music. Sandiford has also long been a passionate advocate for T&T and regional indigenous music. But who exactly is Don Carrington?
Many from east Trinidad may already know Dr Carrington as the dental surgeon at Total Oral Centre in Sangre Grande. Others may remember him as the popular DJ who spun for UWI student parties in the late 1990s in St Augustine (he still actively DJs, he says).
Originally from Tobago, Dr Don Carrington grew up in Sangre Grande, Trinidad, and he says that since childhood, he’s had a lifelong passion for local music.
“When I was 12 or 13, I started collecting music. I have always been interested in music. When I was in high school at St Mary’s College, I sang in the choir, and took part in the music festival. I sang in UWI’s Christmas choir... Then I dabbled as a DJ at UWI.”
He seriously started collecting music when the whole industry was moving to digital in the early 1990s.
“I wanted to do something with all the music I had been collecting. I have a three-year-old daughter, and it crossed my mind that there is so much music she would not hear when some of our older musicians and performers pass on.
“So I brainstormed with a friend of mine. We had studied together—he’s Bajan and living in the US. He suggested: Why don’t we do a mobile app and focus on Caribbean music?”
After that decision, and consultation with three other colleagues, all of them CIC Old Boys and UWI alumni, they formed the Caribbean Riddim Media Archive Limited, with Carrington as its CEO. The company has six directors, including Richard Haynes of South-Central Entertainment in Barbados, Dr Arvind Ramnarine, and Simeon Sandiford of Sanch Electronix.
Their archive is intended to do three things: to share Caribbean music with the world; to be the basis of a viable, profitable home-grown business which earns income for local artistes and to help preserve unique indigenous music for future generations.
He said ensuring the artistes receive payment for their music is very important to him:
“Part of the plan is to allow all the people who hold rights to content to be rewarded for it. It is the only way that the system can be sustainable. It’s the only way that guys will continue to make music, it is the only way that the next generation of musicians would want to get into music, and it is the only way that we will have resources to properly train that next generation of musicians and music industry technicians and experts.”
“Piracy is one of the reasons streaming was adopted in the larger jurisdictions of the developed world... Now, it’s true that many people can find whatever song they want on the Internet, and download it illegally for free—but it takes time, and the quality might not be up to mark. So part of what we are introducing is convenience—with streaming, you can get a large amount of Caribbean music right on your phone or your computer, it is easy to search, and it is of a good quality.”
More info
Caziq website: http://caziq.com
https://www.facebook.com/caziqapp/
Caziq email: riddim@caziq.com
Caziq is also on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter—@caziqapp
Association of Caribbean Copyright Societies: ACCS: http://accscaribbean.com
South Central Entertainment: http://www.southcentral246.com
Copyright Music Organisation of T&T: http://www.cott.org.tt/