On the crowded streets of Paris' multi-ethnic 18th district, the sale of pirated tapes and cassettes going for peanuts has long been a booming trade. Not so common is the recent buzz for good quality, legally-made recordings.
At Africa Productions, the outlet for officially-made tapes and videos, 25-year-old Bathily was thrilled to have found cassettes direct from Senegal television, featuring Domou Baay, and the current hit music compilation, Takkussanu N'Dakaru.
"I live in Paris, but with the films and music directly from Dakar, I have my head and my heart back there at home."
The store in a down-at-heels section of the northern 18th arrondissement, or district, has a catalogue of television films and music cassettes from the continent, which are all legal quality recordings, originating from Senegal, Gambia, Mali and Cote d'Ivoire.
In 1997, the company signed contracts with state television in Senegal, the west African country with the greatest number of audiovisual productions, and the following year with Gambia.
"Our most intimate get-togethers to watch the films and music tapes are always within the community," said Babacar Sall, 41, from Dakar.
Sall says the audiovisual attraction is much stronger than novels or poetry, because the Wolof language is based on an oral tradition.
"For me, it's the music I like the most, but my wife and her friends love the films, because they can check out the latest fashions and how actresses are wearing their hair," Sall said.
Sall is the director of Banlieues du Monde (Suburbs of the World), an association that takes groups of French secondary school students to train on construction sites in Africa.
The battle for the hearts and minds of African expatriates has long been open to anyone who could mass-produce pirated cassettes, but with no guarantee of quality and no royalty payments to the theatre troupes who produce the films.
"Our greatest battle has always been with pirated cassettes in film and music," says Frenchwoman Nadine Besnard, who runs Africa Productions with her husband Mohamed Diakite, from Mali.
"In France, we have succeeded in eliminating almost all the bootlegs from the market, but in Italy we sell only 25 percent of what we should be selling. Our cassettes are pirated there and sold more cheaply."
Mohamed Soumare, a 29-year-old from Dakar, until last year worked in an Africa Productions store in Harlem.
"Our cassettes sold very well there to Africans and New Yorkers both white and black, who really like African music," he says, "but there were so many bootleg tapes being sold that eventually we had to close the store."
At most times of day the Paris store is busy.
Africa Productions usually has three or four new releases every month direct from the continent, with the cassettes professionally copied in a factory in Belgium.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
Clambering hand-over-hand, sweat dripping into his eyes, a durian laborer expertly slices a cumbersome fruit from a tree before tossing it down to land with a soft thump in his colleague’s waiting arms about 15m below. Among Thailand’s most famous and lucrative exports, the pungent “king of fruits” is as distinctive in its smell as its spiky green-brown carapace, and has been farmed in the kingdom for hundreds of years. However, a vicious heat wave engulfing Southeast Asia has resulted in smaller yields and spiraling costs, with growers and sellers increasingly panicked as global warming damages the industry. “This year is a crisis,”
HIGH-TECH: As leading-edge process technologies become more complicated, only a handful of players are able to provide design services, the company’s CEO said Artificial intelligence (AI) chip designer Alchip Technologies Ltd (世芯) yesterday said that revenue would grow significantly again in 2026 after adding a major AI chip customer, reversing moderation amid a product transition next year. The Taipei-based application-specific IC (ASIC) designer reiterated its strong revenue growth forecast for this year and 2026 after its stock plummeted about 23 percent to NT$3,145 from a peak of NT$4,085 on March 6 amid growing competition. Alchip said it has built strong partnerships with cloud service providers (CSP), denying that it had lost orders to smaller competitors such as Faraday Technology Corp (智原). Faraday said it has secured