(c) peripheries

The Times reports on the latest media coup from Bono’s PRODUCT(RED): a digital music service to help Africa pay for antiretroviral medicines.

“The still-unnamed service, which is scheduled to start in September, will deliver customers three new pieces of exclusive content a week for a monthly fee of $5. Half of that money will go through (RED) to the Global Fund, and the other half will go to the artists who contribute songs and to their record companies.”

U2, Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello and Elton John are amongst some of the “superstar acts” who will receive half of the money (they may be established an famous but there are huge costs associated with the life-style of a star).

Time for a back of the envelope calculation.

Let’s take a country like Uganda, where in 2007 there was an estimated 1,000,000 people living with HIV/AIDS, 350,000 in need of ARV treatment and less than half (115,000) receiving it (data sources: Global Health Facts, PEPFAR and WHO).

Let’s look at how much PEPFAR invested in Uganda in 2007: US$ 236 millions of which US$ 130 millions were spent on treatment (PEPFAR 55% spending rule) or more accurately contributed to providing treatment for 106,000 people (the emphasis is important, because it does not mean that PEPFAR fully paid for the treatment).

Finally let’s do a few divisions and multiplications, at US$ 30 per year per users, the PRODUCT(RED) Music service would need a little bit more than 4.3 million registered users to match PEPFAR’s treatment interventions in Uganda. This is quite a number but nothing impossible. It is said that Apple has sold an average of over 2.6 million songs every day since the iTunes store opened on April 28, 2003. At 99 cents a song that quite a lot of money! The big difference is that iTunes users chose what they want to pay for.

So Africa get US$2.5 per month per user and what do the user gets?  Each week users would receive “two songs in MP3 format, one from a superstar act like U2, whose frontman, Bono, was a co-founder of (RED), and one from a less established artist. The third piece of content will be a “crackerjack surprise,” a song, video or short story.”

That, I find scary…a CRACKERJACK surprise? A new series of America’s got talent recently started and previous Pop Idol and X-factor has-been are lining up backstage. A SHORT STORY ? I can wait to know more about that one too.

But let’s not be too cynical and share some of Bono’s feel good factor: “I have no doubt that some of the music software we are working on at (RED) will help change the way music is received, as well as changing the lives of Africans who will die without the AIDS drugs that (RED) can provide.”

(RED)assuringly daft, as well.

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