Fighting Piracy in the Church: Getting Creative Beyond CD Sales

 

Rev Sam Adeyemi and Bryan Crute during ELC 2012 (courtesy Daystar Christian Centre)

Follow @bayonuggets

Last week, Senior Pastor of Daystar Christian Centre, Pastor Sam Adeyemi took a big swoop at Piracy with his Twitter account.
He started a hashtag #StopPiracyNow and it went viral, trending in the Lagos area. With the hashtag, he was discussed piracy in the context of the Nigerian situation and called for purchase of original content ONLY.
Reading it all, I wondered for a moment: Has piracy begun to hit the church?

Last I checked Daystar Christian Centre doesn’t own a record label, yet so Pastor Sam’s big deal with piracy is well, fairly odd. Maybe if his neighbour down the road, Pastor Chris Okotie was tweeting about it, then that would be pretty normal.









Or could it be that Pastor Sam’s Pneuma Publishing has been a victim of piracy these days? Just saying. Well everything Pastor Sam has said is true, we should all purchase original copies, I totally agree and endorse his #StopPiracyNow message. I do have another perspective though about how we can fight piracy in the church.

Daystar Christian Centre averages at least 20,000 regular worshippers every Sunday in person and perhaps half of that number joining online via live streaming.  That’s a mega church even by global standards, and something tells me that Pastor Sam has plans to triple that number in the next 5 years, worst case scenario.
The reason why the above point is to be noted is because in a normal scenario the mass of people that attend Daystar is a huge market for Pneuma Publishing, any day anytime, Just as the attendees of any church provide a market for CD sales. However for some reason the economics for purchasing messages in the average Pentecostal church is not so fantastic.

A CD with one message sells for N200 and in my opinion that’s expensive. I even went to one church where a CD sells for N500.

So far the cheapest place to get a message in Lagos, as far as I have seen is Covenant Christian Centre, where an option to download a message from their e-library costs N100 per message, this in my opinion is commendable.

I’m firmly of the opinion that the church needs to get the truth of the gospel into as many hands as possible at a very cheap price. That our content is cheap doesn’t mean it is invaluable.
Churches can work out a system to crash the price of a message after a certain period i.e. 1- 2yrs after it has been released.

The good news of Jesus was entirely free, but I understand the church’s need to get a commercial value to derive revenue for it these days, running the media unit of a church today can be expensive and in the end, no one is smiling to the bank, not even our brethren with a N500 per CD price (Yes I had to mention that again, unbelievable, right?).

I think the challenge before the average church in Nigeria is to get messages across to people in a variety of options for next to nothing, trust me the money would return somehow.
When it comes to using the media to propagate the word of God, no one does it better, than our American brothers. You see they have a way of using the media in a thousand ways to buttress the same message God has given them and the average person gets it for a relatively cheap price.
Can I offer a few suggestions for the church in Nigeria?

1. Please cut the crap about CD sales. Rather than sell one message per CD, why don’t you sell a collection of messages in MP3 format on one CD. If your pastor is teaching a series, don’t sell CDs until the series is over. For immediacy sakes, why don’t you set up a digital message e-library (Covenant Christian Centre has one) and allow people download straight from there at a reasonable price. Trust me if you make it very cheap, people would download many message titles and be blessed. Some people would even wait for the series mp3 CD and purchase it all at your price when you are done.
2. Use the web. ITunes and Sound Cloud are fantastic places to put your messages. May I just implore the average Nigerian pastor to make use of iTunes? It’s a great place to position your church as a brand. But here’s another thing, please make sure your audio files are light, as a rule of thumb, do not exceed 10 MB. Your primary flock in Nigeria have internet challenges and the cost of the web isn’t exactly cheap, so keep it light.Now you don’t have to post the entire message there, you can create a 15 –30 minute-highlight of your message, although there is nothing wrong in posting a full message, many churches do and they haven’t regretted it in the least possible way.
3.        Please, can a church in Nigeria get creative with Youtube? I have some ideas, and trust me this space won’t be enough to tell you about it. I’ll only implore you to visit This Present House’s Youtube channel, they do a bit of what is in my mind, but trust me there’s still more to be done.

If we must tackle piracy, we must create a variety of options that make it possible for our people not to have a reason to give it a thought. And that means in a world where digital media economics is tilting towards ‘free-mium’ we must creatively explore ways to get the gospel of Jesus Christ into as many hands as possible for next-to-thing (in commercial terms) yet retain a commercially viable product that attracts revenue to keep the cycle going.

May the Holy Spirit teach us!