If you were to walk into a music store, and see Kathem El Saher’s smile on his new album, you would think that the “Caesar” simply has another hit on his hands. However, though the audience was oblivious, it was big a surprise for music stores in Cairo, and the entire Arab world, that Kathem El Saher’s album was released last Thursday. The album, “Yawmiyat Rajul Mahzoum”, was expected to be released in summer according to Rotana and Kathem’s agreement. Rotana decided on this to combat the constantly stagnating CD/K7 market. This widespread stagnation caused the failure of most recent album releases, including seven Rotana releases. Needless to say, it was a big loss for Rotana. These losses have been mostly attributed to the rising illegal copies and internet distribution of music.

Rotana had kept Kathem’s album, an expensive project in terms of distribution and advertising, for the summer so as to make up for losses until then. If the album failed, the company would have lost even more money than it already has. This decision was made public to distributors, and Kathem’s fans were aware also. However, last week the album surprisingly showed up in music stores and advertising campaigns began to promote the album in today’s extremely tough market.

The story behind this brash behavior, and probably also the delay of Angham’s album, was that the company had to release the album prematurely because some of its songs had been illegally distributed, spread by the hackers for some websites. An urgent meeting was held at Rotana headquarters to discuss the crisis and the best way to handle it. The decision was taken to release the album as soon as possible and stem the losses.

The stolen songs were excluded from Kathem’s album, which is probably why the album had fewer songs than his previous releases, with ten tracks only. Apparently, one of the stolen songs was the album’s original title song! What point have we reached when we harm our artists to enjoy their art? I have said it once, and I’ll say it again, if you download an artist’s album, and like the majority of it, do the singer a favor and support them by purchasing a copy of the album. Have you seen the prices of a K7 cassette today? It’s the least you can do to let the artist know you want them to continue what they do.

By Ahmed