E-Mail This Article to a Friend Worldwide Web world music The local Calabash Music site offers international downloads BY BANNING EYRE

Next Thursday, August 26, a little-known roots band from Niger, Mamar Kassey, are coming to the Davis Square club Johnny D’s. If you’re curious about the band’s prickly desert jams, which are rich with plucked and bowed strings, searing vocal melodies, and elegant percussion, you can visit mamarlive.calabashmusic.com, read about the group, and even hear samples of their music, including a set of songs not found on either of their two international releases. The previously unavailable tracks come from a live acoustic set that will be released on CD sometime next year. In the meantime, if you like what you hear, you can buy these songs as MP3 downloads for 99 cents per track. Not only will you be hearing the latest from an exceptional West African band, but half of the money you spend will go directly to the musicians, far more than they would earn if you were to purchase one of their CDs. For Brad Powell, the creator of calabashmusic.com, this is no mere techno-novelty: when you buy from Calabash’s growing catalogue of world music, you are participating in what he likens to a revolution.

"Calabash is setting about to be a new conduit between independent musicians and their audience," says Powell over the phone from his home office in Arlington. The concept is simple: the artist licenses music on a non-exclusive basis and the two parties split the proceeds. Sometimes a third party — a "curator" — splits the Calabash cut, but the artist always takes half, so the deal is attractive to musicians.

Powell has nothing against record companies — in fact, he has cooperative agreements with many independent labels as well as with other music retailers, who make their catalogues available to the Calabash system. The problem is that labels can’t begin to keep up with the volumes of interesting music being recorded around the world. With CD sales down, manufacturers are cutting back. Meanwhile, digital recording technology is finding its way into the world’s remote towns and villages, and labels that once served to introduce local music to a global market have created a bottleneck. Radical changes in global music distribution are unavoidable. "The genie is out of the bottle," says Powell. "The technology is here, and all these players want to participate."

Calabash’s "fair trade" approach provides an alternative to piracy for conscientious music fans, but its real advantage lies in its appeal to artists and producers, who rarely decline Powell’s offer. For musicians in places like Africa and South America, the frustrations of dealing with the grim realities of most record labels — low royalty rates, slow production times, feeble promotion efforts — make any alternative look good. And as Powell spins it, fair-trade downloads are the obvious solution. "Soon it will be too easy to not do. Once you have broadband wireless blanketing every major city in North America, Europe, and Asia, you’ll sit down with your multi-purpose unit and do all this stuff — buy a song, send a song to a friend, listen to the radio. I don’t think that’s a distant dream. Within two or three years, we’ll all be participating."

Powell acknowledges that he’s a small player in the fast-growing game of on-line music sales. His advantage is his focus on the chronically neglected world-music market, actually a network of smaller niche markets. Few corporate forces have the stomach to deal with such complexities. To find the good stuff, Calabash allies itself with media forces, including music writers, radio, television, and Web entities. I myself work with Public Radio International’s Afropop Worldwide as a producer and Web-site editor. I experienced Powell’s powers of persuasion first-hand in the early days of calabashmusic.com when he came to ask us to create links to the program’s Web site. Afropop Worldwide now offers Calabash Music downloads at afropop.org; they include hot picks, classic CDs, and field recordings found only in the NPR program archives.

Powell’s experience with the satellite television channel Link TV is instructive. Every week, Link TV debuts a video by a new international artist, and viewers can go to the channel’s Web site and download these songs using the Calabash system. "This has created some relative hits. There’s one group called Nightlosers, an unlikely ensemble from Romania that plays bluegrass. They are completely unknown, but they have this quirky, funny, visually interesting video, and every time it shows on Link, they become one of the top downloaded artists on our site."

Powell describes the site as "a carefully curated boutique." You can sample and download music recommended by a trusted music writer, Link TV, Afropop, or the on-line magazine Brazil.com. A massive selection of new independent music from Brazil — all genres — is due for launch in September. Soon, Calabash will allow its curators, and even its users, to publish play lists of favorite songs. Web listeners can play these lists like radio programs, purchasing tracks as they go.

As for sales figures, Powell points out that calabashmusic.com has been on-line in its full glory only since last November. But he’s bullish. "If people look at what iTunes is doing, they’re going to say, ‘Whoa, you’ve got a long way to go.’ But every month since November has been our best month. In July, we had 50,000 visits, and 85 percent of those discovered us using a search engine. For those who click through and decide to buy something, the average purchase is about $11, up from $8 back in January. We’ve sold over 50,000 songs this year, which I think is fabulous. And this is based on a catalogue that has only about 500 artists and 7500 individual tracks. We now have license agreements in place for another 2000 artists, and we are upgrading our way of adding artists to the site so that we can do it much more quickly."

iTunes, eMusic, Microsoft, and other heavyweights are scrambling to ride the coming wave of electronic music sales, but Powell isn’t worried. "The realm of international, independent music is a huge space. There’s always going to be room to grow. Sure, it’s possible that somebody like Microsoft or iTunes could walk into the space that we’re trying to operate in and completely take it. But I don’t believe they will."

That’s because these giants would never bother to create all the alliances and relationships, or reach out to all the niche audiences, that Powell has. Recently, Calabash forged an alliance with Dorchester’s Restaurante Cesaria, which is known for its Cape Verdean music nights. The owner has a studio on the premises and has been recording these shows — often involving top Cape Verdean musicians — for more than seven years. Calabash and Cesaria are now licensing the best of that music to sell as downloads. Another new alliance involves the Mendes Brothers, who also are a force in New England’s Cape Verdean music scene. The Mendeses’ studio can get more of its music to market this way than by using the standard record-label model it’s struggled with for years. "And it serves as a test of the market. If something does well, they can turn around and press the CD."

Powell is the first to acknowledge that Calabash is barely on the radar screen yet, but this one-time acoustic-musician and producer, who began his endeavor with virtually no technical background, projects the serene confidence of a man in the right place at the right time. "All little enterprises take their time, but we’re at a very interesting moment. So many opportunities keep coming our way, just landing in our laps."

Mamar Kassey perform next Thursday, August 26, at Johnny D’s, 17 Holland Street in Davis Square; call (617) 776-2004.