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The Haitian Music Industry and the Institutional Structure of Music Production. They [Haitian producers] are always looking to stab you somewhere. If I ask them for money from my albums that they sold, there is nothing. So I have to wait. So basically my money is financing their project. When their project comes out, they're still not going to pay me. They're going to put me in a bind where I'll have to take a certain amount of their product and sell it to pay me back what they owe me. Four or five months go by and still no money. And I have to pay the artists. Until it changes, there will be a lot of debts and bad receivables and thing like that. . Haitian bands have traditionally recorded for a lump-sum fee, forsaking royalties. Some performers have come to regard the lump-sum fee as a hedge against exploitation, assuming that producers will underreport record sales anyway and that some will go bankrupt before paying their accounts. The lump-sum payment is clean and risk free, and yet it introduces a heightened alienation of the artists from the musical product. Whereas royalties imply a continuing ownership interest in intellectual and artistic product, the lump-sum system cuts the tie after the band leaves the studio.
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The
Haitian audience expects bands to produce one or two albums per year, often seasonally:
one for vakans (summer vacation season, during which many bands tour the countryside)
and the other for the Christmas and kanaval (carnival) season. Should a band fail
to produce an album for a period of more than an year, audiences and the media
typically question whether the band is "going down." The schedule of annual or
semiannual seasonal production, combined with the practice of selling albums to
producers for flat fees, has encouraged among some musicians an assembly-line
approach to music production, although this is certainly not unique in the world's
commercial music (where it may be something closer to the rule).
Some Haitian bands formed their own production companies to produce, promote, manage, and keep books. These "vanity" labels have included: Shleu-Shleu Records, Tabou Combo Records and Tapes, Ti-Da Records (Magnum Band), Pas De Shah (Skah Shah), Superstar Records (D.P. Express) and Machiavel Productions (System Band). Although musicians achieve greater control of the production of their music, the problems of undercapitalization, spotty distribution, meager markets, expectations about number of productions, and lack of promotion where seldom redressed by this measure.
Until President Jean-Bertrand Aristide signed the Berne convention in August of 1995, there were no grounds for enforcement of intellectual property rights in Haiti. Even with the Berne Convention in place, the experience in states like Thailand indicates that there is a large gulf between acceding to international conventions and enforcing them. Guitarist Robert Martino lamented, "there's no rights; there's no security. It's not like here in the States where you make a record and if the record is doing very good, you make money on it, or in France, where if your music is playing on the radio, you get paid for it. In Haiti, they don't pay you-shit, you have to pay them to play your music!"
Haitian artists also lacked an organization representing their legal, economic, and creative interests. Most Haitian performers who sold records and toured in the French Antilles joined the Syndicat des Auteurs, compositeurs, et Editeurs de Musiques (SACEM) to reap the benefits in this portion of their market, and musicians initiated discussions with SACEM about extending SACEM*s purview to Haiti. Haitian performers active in the United States increasingly register their songs with the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP). The historic lack of copyright protection and enforcement in Haiti, and the rampant piracy that resulted, were always a disincentive to investing the time and money to attain something close to international standards of recording.
The informal or unofficial
sector of the Haitian music industry-which includes piracy (unauthorized copying)
and bootlegging (unauthorized recording)-dwarfs the legitimate industry in the
insular market by a factor of perhaps four to one. Pirated and bootlegged tapes
are available in stores and from street vendors in all municipalities of Haiti
at well below half the cost of long-playing records or compact discs: "There are
some people who buy a record of the band; they record the songs on a cassette,
and then they sell the cassette on the streets or in the stores. As for live recordings,
anyone can come with their cassette machine, record the music we're playing, and
then make a copy and sell it before the music is released on an album. There are
no laws against this in Haiti".
Many
of the cassettes have handwritten covers and make no pretense at authorization
or legitimacy. More recently, the ease of digital piracy has resulted in a rash
of high-quality pirate compact discs for the diasporic and foreign markets which
masquerade (and are sold) as legitimate recordings. Legitimate producers have
never produced much in the way of cassettes for insular consumption, assuming
that the cassette market is saturated with the cheap pirated versions. The pirate
industry, then, is left as the only sector satisfying the large demand for cheap
musical commodities
under conditions of intense 
poverty.
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