EW thanks project Co-sponsor

About EW Music

EW Music is the music department of Empowerment Works! The purpose is to support African musicians by recording them, get a small scale production of their music off the ground, connect them to an audience outside their particular country through the internet, put them in touch with Western promoters and musicians and set up small portable recording units in rural areas in Africa as well as train people to work them. In the meantime, we bring out compilation Cds of the recordings we find suitable for Western ears, in order to raise funds for these activities. We have signed a contract with each artist, which prohibits exploitation of their music commercially outside our charitable objectives.

How it Works

EW-Music offers African musicians the opportunity to record their music for free. We issue each recorded artist with a professionally mixed Master CD for reproduction and a simple cassette cover with their picture and name. The musicians hold all rights to their recordings for the African market; they can freely duplicate, promote and sell their work.

From the many recordings produced, EW-Music selects suitable tracks for the production of compilation CDs to be sold in the West. We adopt different distribution and marketing strategies depending on the nature recorded material. Through in-kind distribution, marketing and volunteer support of professional sound engineers (such as Erik Krosby (http://www.plazmasound.com/) EW ensures 70% of income is is reinvested in the region to create greater artistic and economic opportunities (see Where We Work - Senegal). EW-Music also links up the artists with future promoters in the industry to help artists reach their full potential and enrich world musical heritage.

Community Impact

In the Casamance region of Senegal, West Africa the local Diola culture and the vital eco-systems they cherish are at risk. EW Music is the foundation of a multi-sector strategy to reverse desertification, combat malaria and assure food security by advancing economic opportunities that value indigenous heritage. Through EW Music the people of this region lend their voices, talent and cultural assets to raise awareness and funds for locally-based solutions.

Letter from Tobias Stürmer, Artistic Director

"We hope for this type of grass roots, fair trade recording project to inspire others and to present the rapidly changing music industry with new ways of looking at markets, however small. Our recordings present totally new music to the Western listener as we only work with artists who don't have access to recording facilities back home. If you buy our records, you are guaranteed that all the proceeds, not just a fraction, go partly to the musicians themselves, partly to a charity, which creates opportunities for these musicians in Africa and which is small scale and very much on the ground where they work. On top of that, we are creating artistic friendships between musicians by remixing and post-producing some of the raw field recordings in London, Cologne and elsewhere in the world and asking musicians to help us out. When we do that, we give the rights of the remixes to the original musicians, meaning they can sell and promote those remixes independently of us, while we are allowed to market them only for charitable purposes. We have been running for three years now and we have recently produced our first Compilation CD on south Senegalese music called La Musique Diola. This is possibly the first compilation of Diola music in existence. Ten Diola bands, choirs and traditional dance companies have collaborated with us. They all have received their recordings, they were excited about all our post-productions on their material and they all want to work with us in the future. If you like our vision and the result of our work and want to contribute, please get in touch. We now need to secure funding and ask music stores to donate equipment in kind. We need press and radio play.

Enjoy the music!"

EWM Artistic Director, Tobias Sturmer, tells all in this (9 min.) interview:

Part 1:

Part 2: