Big Ben Widens Music Reach With Downloading Cards

Music is one of the world’s ancient forms of artwork. The ways in which people access, listen to and share it have been changing with every generation.

It is with this in mind that Big Ben embarked on a venture to give his fans an alternative way to buy his music, instead of the old way of buying copies at retailers and music outlets. He is launching a download card which will make it easier for fans, who don’t necessarily want a hard copy, to buy his music online.

A download card is basically a business card sized piece of card which contains instructions to a website and a unique code to use to redeem a download of music.

The concept is one which Big Ben is giving a test run for now and will only be for his latest album, ‘First Collection’. Each card can only be used for one purchase.

Big Ben reveals that it also benefits him as an artist as he saves on printing costs, distribution and many more high costs related to producing hard copies. “This card solves the issue of illegal file sharing, allowing people to have their music easily accessible on mobile devices,” said Big Ben. He decided to take up the idea after seeing that more and more international artists were following this route. “This method is super fast. I received the first batch of of cards in just nine days after making the order from Philadelphia in the United States of America. The company which prints the cards for him also prints hard copies of his albums, which they then distribute to the American and European market.

While emphasising the need to reduce illegal file sharing, Big Ben stressed the need to distinguish the difference between illegal file sharing and piracy. “People share files illegally because most of us (Namibian artists) don’t supply our music in a format that makes our music easily accessible. So many of our young people don’t own CD players any more so we are giving them an option. Young people and the working class spend more time on their mobile and digital devices, to the point that they do not even buy CD players in their homes or cars any more, and since most music is only available on CD they simply resort to illegal downloads or file sharing.” These people don’t necessarily share music for a profit, he says.

The download card will be available from today at Antonio’s Art at half the cost of a CD in hard copy, N$49. In future other cards will also be produced for future albums.

To date Big Ben has been one of the very few Namibian musicians who sells his music online, on major music online stores since the release of ‘Moro Moro’. A song like ‘Moro Moro’ still brings in an average N$4000 a year from online radio stations and stores. His music is on over 24 major online stores as well as sites that offers licensing for film, radio, theatre and multimedia productions internationally such as AudioSparx.

This is the future of music distribution, Big Ben says, urging other artists to follow suit. “The cassette has phased out, the CD is on its way out as well so how long do we plan on playing catch up?