The Music That Might Not Otherwise Exist
The Work Behind the Music — Story No. 01
The first Voice of Maasai album came back to Tanzania in my suitcase. I had returned with copies of a recording we had made the year before in a small studio in Arusha. The singers had gathered there, we had recorded the songs, and eventually those songs became something I could hold in my hands and carry back across an ocean.
There was no record label then. At least not one I knew I was building.
I had first traveled to Tanzania in 2011 for a month of volunteer work. I wasn't there because of music. But one relationship led to another, and somewhere along the way came a simple question: Could we record this?
The following year, we did. I could have delivered those albums and stopped there.
Instead, there was another singer. Another musician. Another song worth recording. People introduced people. Ideas arrived through conversations rather than pitches. Projects developed slowly, often because someone knew someone else who had something they wanted to make.
One recording became another. Eventually, without much ceremony, there was a catalog. It contains choirs and solo artists, traditional songs and contemporary ones. Songs about mothers, identity, love, resilience, community and home. Some have traveled farther than we expected. Others remain relatively quiet.
But they are there. I think about that more now. The music exists.
A song that once lived between a few people in a room became a recording. Something that could leave the room. Something an artist could share. Something someone thousands of miles away could find years later.
That doesn't make the economics of running a small independent label disappear. There are still registrations and rights and contracts and distribution and metadata and expenses. There are mistakes to correct and systems to understand. There are projects that work and projects that don't. Opportunities arrive. Sometimes they disappear again.
For years, I tended to measure all of this against what hadn't happened yet. More listeners. More revenue. The licensing deal. The next opportunity.
Those things matter. If Voice of Maasai is going to continue, sustainability matters.
But lately I have found myself returning to something much more basic. Did something exist afterward that didn't exist before?
More than a decade later, someone can press play and hear voices recorded in that room years ago. An artist can send a song to someone they have never met. A filmmaker can discover it. A listener somewhere else in the world can hear a voice they otherwise might never have encountered.
It simply makes what happens next possible.