"...Wait, do I know you?" asked Sime­on San­di­ford, crack­ing a smile, his salt-and-pep­per hair and jovial laugh-lines the on­ly vis­i­ble signs of a man who is age­ing very grace­ful­ly.Sime­on San­di­ford, known by many sim­ply as Sanch, is a vet­er­an in the TT mu­sic busi­ness from a tech­ni­cal, record­ing and lo­cal busi­ness point of view.

San­di­ford is man­ag­ing di­rec­tor of Sanch Elec­tron­ix Ltd, and a vot­ing mem­ber of The Record­ing Acad­e­my (for 25 years), a US or­gan­i­sa­tion of mu­si­cians, pro­duc­ers, record­ing en­gi­neers and oth­er record­ing pro­fes­sion­als ded­i­cat­ed to im­prov­ing the qual­i­ty of life for mu­sic and its mak­ers.

San­di­ford spoke to the Guardian in an in­ter­view last month at the In­ter­na­tion­al Con­fer­ence and Panora­ma (which took place Au­gust 4-9) on how we can im­prove T&T's mu­sic sec­tor.

A for­mer stu­dent of St Mary's Col­lege, Port-of-Spain, San­di­ford stud­ied the sci­ences, maths, Latin, Greek and French at school, and went on to earn an MSc in Ap­plied Physics at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies in 1975. San­di­ford is al­so a life­time mem­ber and dis­tin­guished alum­ni awardee of UWIAATT (2011).

But San­di­ford has eclec­tic in­ter­ests: arts and cul­ture, eco­nom­ic em­pow­er­ment, ed­u­ca­tion and sci­ence are just a few of his long-held caus­es. For decades now, he's been a pas­sion­ate ad­vo­cate for TT mu­sic. In­deed, his busi­ness, Sanch Elec­tron­ix, has as its mis­sion state­ment: "To pro­duce, pro­mote and mar­ket the mu­sic of T&T and re­lat­ed mul­ti­me­dia prod­ucts and ser­vices with­in the glob­al com­mu­ni­ty."

Start­ed in 1979, Sanch Elec­tron­ix orig­i­nal­ly made loud­speak­er sys­tems to sup­ple­ment high-end im­port­ed au­dio equip­ment. But with the eco­nom­ic down­turn of the mid-eight­ies, the com­pa­ny start­ed sell­ing in­dige­nous cul­tur­al prod­ucts, in­clud­ing mu­sic. In 1995, San­di­ford start­ed the Sanch CD la­bel.

More re­cent­ly, the busi­ness has shift­ed em­pha­sis to ser­vices, of­fer­ing on-lo­ca­tion and stu­dio record­ing, mas­ter­ing and mix­ing, edit­ing, archive trans­fer­ence, au­dio restora­tion and CD repli­ca­tion. It al­so of­fers two ICT-de­rived prod­ucts: the Pan in Ed­u­ca­tion Busi­ness Mod­el, and Pe­te the Pan­stick in­ter­ac­tive soft­ware to teach mu­sic lit­er­a­cy through pan.

'Archive and com­mer­cialise our reper­toire'

San­di­ford was em­phat­ic about one point:

"We need a struc­tured mu­sic in­dus­try, with a pur­pose–to archive and com­mer­cialise our reper­toire."Look­ing at TT's mu­sic sec­tor, he com­ment­ed: "In TT we have pock­ets of in­su­lar­i­ty, and we won't pen­e­trate the glob­al mar­ket­place like this."He pro­posed a sim­ple ap­proach:

"All the mu­sic pro­duc­ers should get to­geth­er–be­cause we have the reper­toire–with the Gov­ern­ment (though Mu­sicTT), which has the cap­i­tal, the out­reach and the con­tacts. We can then con­cen­trate on what we can do best (which is mak­ing mu­sic), and they can find the lever­age to get it out there. It's col­lab­o­ra­tion, and we split the re­turns eq­ui­tably.

"So then, we can ac­tu­al­ly in­vite the big play­ers. And there are on­ly four of them: Sony Mu­sic En­ter­tain­ment (Japan­ese-owned), Uni­ver­sal Mu­sic Group (French), EMI (now part of Uni­ver­sal) and Warn­er Mu­sic Group (US-owned). We can in­vite them to come and bid for our reper­toire."

'Cott must crack down on pi­rates'

San­di­ford said Cott and the rel­e­vant au­thor­i­ties must find a way to crack down on copy­right in­fringe­ments:

"The biggest prob­lem in the arts is that no one has any re­spect for in­tel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty. So pi­rat­ing, or buy­ing one piece of mu­sic and giv­ing it away to 50 peo­ple, is the norm. But every time you do that, you af­fect the artist, to the point where he might ask: why even both­er to make a good prod­uct, when it will hit the streets even be­fore it's re­leased? That's the re­al­i­ty of it.

"If we don't make good qual­i­ty prod­ucts, we are go­ing nowhere. So you have to en­cour­age the artiste to spend a lit­tle more time in the stu­dio to make qual­i­ty prod­ucts. This is not a 'now-for-now' thing.

"So we have to tight­en up on the copy­right pro­tec­tion laws," said San­di­ford.

"With the ad­vent of dig­i­tal rights man­age­ment, there's a whole oth­er ball game go­ing on out there: look at the chaos that ex­ists in the dig­i­tal do­main now, with In­ter­net ra­dio, dig­i­tal down­loads, YouTube, Face­book, and oth­er posts just go­ing up in Cy­ber­space, and no-one see­ing any re­turns on their in­vest­ment. So Cott has to get its act to­geth­er in terms of: How do they man­age the dig­i­tal do­main?"

Dig­i­tal stream­ing: One Caribbean Voice

Mean­while, means of ex­pe­ri­enc­ing mu­sic have rad­i­cal­ly changed from the days of buy­ing vinyl records and CDs, and even from down­load­ing mp3s; to­day, the stream­ing of digi­tised mu­sic via the In­ter­net has be­come the new norm, ever since Spo­ti­fy be­came avail­able in the US in 2011. Spo­ti­fy of­fers ac­cess to more than 30 mil­lion songs. In the US, stream­ing rev­enues have now over­tak­en CD rev­enues, ac­cord­ing to www.whathi­fi.com.

With au­dio stream­ing, peo­ple can ac­cess mu­sic from their PC, mo­bile de­vice or home au­dio sys­tem. A month­ly flat fee gives ac­cess to mil­lions of tunes. This flat rate of­ten in­cludes ad­di­tion­al fea­tures such as cre­at­ing a per­son­al ra­dio, shar­ing playlists, or read­ing re­views about newest re­leas­es. Stream­ing ser­vices to­day in­clude Spo­ti­fy, Beats Mu­sic, Rhap­sody, Google Play Mu­sic, Tidal, Ap­ple Mu­sic, Deez­er, Quobuz, Rdio, My­Space Mu­sic, Pan­do­ra, Rara and Slack­er.

Stream­ing of­fers great con­ve­nience and af­ford­abil­i­ty with mp3-type, lossy for­mats–but it can al­so of­fer CD-qual­i­ty, loss­less au­dio ser­vices (eg Quobuz, Tidal and Deez­er Elite) at high­er month­ly sub­scrip­tion prices.

San­di­ford thinks stream­ing is the way to go. San­di­ford is the founder of One Caribbean Voice, a for­ward-think­ing, en­ter­pris­ing busi­ness par­a­digm which, among oth­er things, aims to stream Caribbean and re­gion­al mu­sic at a high qual­i­ty res­o­lu­tion–not mp3 or oth­er low­er end for­mats–at a month­ly sub­scrip­tion rate.

One Caribbean Voice is hop­ing that Span­ish con­tent providers join them, such as Cu­ba's na­tion­al record la­bel EGREM (for Em­pre­sa de Graba­ciones y Edi­ciones Mu­si­cales, or En­ter­prise of Record­ings and Mu­si­cal Edi­tions).

"EGREM in Cu­ba con­tains the biggest stu­dio mu­sic archive in the Caribbean," said San­di­ford: "They have maybe 50,000 al­bums archived, go­ing back to Nat King Cole.....All kinds of ex­cel­lent mu­sic archived. But what good is it sit­ting in a vault? We have to digi­tise it, and al­low peo­ple to have ac­cess to it."

One Caribbean Voice al­so has a plan for oth­er kinds of ac­tiv­i­ty, span­ning ed­u­ca­tion soft­ware, well­ness, a mu­sic acad­e­my, so­cial en­tre­pre­neur­ship, en­gi­neer­ing, and even cer­ti­fi­ca­tion. It hopes to in­clude her­itage ma­te­r­i­al from Cu­ba, Ja­maica, TT and oth­er re­gion­al and Latin Amer­i­can neigh­bours. And it plans to or­gan­ise high-pro­file mu­sic and oth­er cul­tur­al events. One event is al­ready planned for May 2016, in­volv­ing Cuban and TT mu­si­cians–in­clud­ing ed­u­ca­tor, com­pos­er, and flu­ent Span­ish speak­er Ray Hol­man.

San­di­ford be­lieves the sub­scrip­tion ser­vice mod­el is a good one, be­cause with enough mu­sic choice, no-one need buy CDs or dig­i­tal mu­sic any­more. In­stead, peo­ple can make their own se­lec­tions and playlists with a broad­band In­ter­net con­nec­tion.

Ad­di­tion­al­ly, sub­scrip­tion stream­ing of­fers re­mark­able flex­i­bil­i­ty and con­ve­nience for those re­search­ing, teach­ing or study­ing mu­sic–they can do it from home, in­stead of go­ing to a phys­i­cal mu­sic li­brary, for in­stance. Sanch said mu­sic from UWI's West In­di­ana col­lec­tion, from our Na­tion­al Li­brary sys­tem, and from lo­cal con­certs like those at Queen's Hall, could all be archived, digi­tised and made avail­able via stream­ing.

Dr Don Car­ring­ton, a den­tist with a love for mu­sic and a large per­son­al col­lec­tion (San­di­ford has an even larg­er col­lec­tion) had ap­proached San­di­ford a year ago to dis­cuss the idea of a sub­scrip­tion mod­el for Caribbean mu­sic stream­ing, said San­di­ford. They're now busi­ness part­ners. Mean­while, San­di­ford is busy col­lect­ing and archiv­ing mu­sic, us­ing a high-end archiv­ing sys­tem from Ko­rea (www.au­ren­der.com) from which mu­sic can be made ready for ac­cess.

Sanch's archive

San­di­ford him­self owns some 30 years' worth of mu­si­cal reper­toire. "What I'm do­ing with my own archive now, is us­ing it as part of the Learn­ing Man­age­ment Sys­tem, Pan On­line/Steel Am­bas­sadors that we are de­vel­op­ing with the Dis­tance Learn­ing Sec­re­tari­at of the Min­istry of Ter­tiary Ed­u­ca­tion.

He said this re­lates to the idea of a struc­tured mu­sic in­dus­try, with a whole cur­ricu­lum de­signed around an an­i­mat­ed in­struc­tor called Pe­te the Pan­stick–part of en­gag­ing youth to be­come mu­sic in­dus­try pro­fes­sion­als (which in­cludes mu­sic jour­nal­ists, pro­duc­tion en­gi­neers, busi­ness peo­ple, and many oth­er mu­sic-re­lat­ed jobs).He said this mod­el can rad­i­cal­ly re­duce the cost of ed­u­ca­tion, as it is a form of dis­tance learn­ing.

"The reper­toire that TT has, that is most im­por­tant, is not nec­es­sar­i­ly the cur­rent mu­sic, you know," not­ed San­di­ford. "It is the back cat­a­logue–mean­ing all those com­bos and big bands such as Joey Lewis, The Dutchy Broth­ers, Clarence Cur­van, Mano Marcelin, Cas­sanovas, The Group So­lo, Rock­er­fel­las, etc–the mu­sic of yes­ter­year. And the sto­ries that we can tell with them. Be­cause it is me­dia you are talk­ing about, now: it's mas, it's Car­ni­val, it's every­thing en­ter­tain­ment."

He thinks we in TT should be man­ag­ing our own mu­sic reper­toire–es­pe­cial­ly the mu­sic that is hiqh qual­i­ty, mar­ketable (for re­search, en­ter­tain­ment, well­ness or oth­er us­es), and unique to us (parang, so­ca, old time ca­lyp­so, gospe­lyp­so, rap­so).He al­so thinks we need to be prac­ti­cal, and have a good bal­ance of lo­cal pop mu­sic with more en­dur­ing qual­i­ty mu­sic.

"...But for me, mu­sic with longevi­ty is the an­swer," he said. "This is the mu­sic that will sus­tain us over time. So, for in­stance, good tra­di­tion­al acoustic and pan mu­sic record­ed on lo­ca­tion in pa­n­yards would last much longer than the Panora­ma mu­sic on the stage."

"The fore­cast for the glob­al me­dia mar­ket next year is in the US$tril­lions. We (the Caribbean) need to play in that mar­ket, be­cause we have things to of­fer the world that no­body else has."

MORE IN­FO

One Caribbean Voice YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wta02YPUGAM

Sanch Elec­tron­ix: 23 King Street, St Joseph

Web­site: www.sanch.com; tele­phone: 663-1384; email: sls@sanch.com