A lot of people are crazy about Blackcoffee's "Turn Me On". It's maybe the first bona fide House Music hit from South Africa, and maybe the track that's going to blow the thing wide open. Please tell me how you came to release this track on GOGO!

"Turn Me On" has been out on Kronologik before, just as "Uyangichomela" by "Shana" has been out on Katsaitis Music. The tracks have primarily been big in their home country, even though a few DJs knew and played the tracks elsewhere, too. To be honest I hadn't heard them before I was in South Africa. I fell in love with the songs and re-released them, as I thought they definitely deserve more attention. I am happy to see how well they do and that I was able to open some new doors for the artists.

I notice there's a professionally produced video for "Turn Me On" as well. Was that an initiative of GOGO or something Blackcoffee or the original label in South Africa did on their own?

The video was done by Kronologik in 2008. As I mentioned, the South African media supports House Music even on nationwide TV stations. Hence it can make sense to do a professional video for a great track. Due to lower prices, they have the advantage that a video is affordable, at least compared to the USA or Europe. I hardly can imagine how such a clip can recoup the investment here. I tried to get the "Turn Me On" video on some music TV channels in Europe without success. As long as the media is not willing to support the genre, it makes no sense to do videos for singles.

I want to ask you the same question three times. As a DJ, how do you feel about the evolution of the music industry in the last few years and the rise of the MP3 as the main media for buying, selling and playing music? How about as an artist? And as a label owner?

I have no objections to mp3s in general. There are positive and negative things about the digital era. A plus is that music is easy to purchase for everybody within seconds and worldwide through download shops. It's become easier and more economic to promote releases and artists with the help of the internet. As a DJ I enjoy travelling with a CD case instead of breaking my back because of the heavy vinyl. A laptop can be a nice thing, too, as it enables the DJs to carry his whole music library with him. As long as there are high quality mp3 or even better wav files on the hard-drive there's nothing to say against it. Personally I still like to dig in a record case or CD case, instead of scrolling through endless menus.

On the other side, a lot of consumers have lost the understanding for the value of music and just swap mp3s. Even though this is nothing really new, I want to mention it here. As most tracks are somewhere gettable for free, a lot of people don't see the necessity to pay for them anymore, without thinking about the aftermath.

The whole blogging and rapidshare thing is a big problem. I think labels should unite to find a solution how to stop this, together with internet providers. File sharing also makes it tougher to create hype for a track. In the '90s, some tracks were around for ages on a few test pressings. Only some tastemakers had them and lots of other DJs were impatiently waiting for the release. If you send out a few digital promos today, it will make the rounds very quickly. You can't avoid that and so you have to release quickly after the first promo mailing - or even before.

At least in the United States, we're seeing the decline of the album as each individual track is "unbundled" and sold as a single, both on sites like Traxsource and of course iTunes. The end user might not even know what the album art looks like. What was your motivation for releasing a full album, and did you feel it met your expectations?

Above all, an album was something I had wanted to do for a long time. When I started GOGO Music, it was impossible to concentrate on a complete album, because of a lack of time and money. I was also searching for the right idea for how to avoid the problem you mentioned. I wanted to prevent people from only purchasing one or the other track of the album. The whole album should be seen and listened to as one work of art and not as an accumulation of songs by one producer.

When the idea for an album without breaks came to my mind, I knew that this could be the solution. For this reason I did not make the album available as single tracks at first. I was hoping that this would not only force people to listen to the entire album, but also that it would help the CD sales. More than half a year after the CD was released, I finally made the individual tracks available in download shops.

Thanks to singles taken from the album, it did okay from a financial aspect. Personally I have been very content about the feedback I received on it. It was definitely worth the hard work, even though I have to admit that I expected a bit more CD sales. But that's probably a problem in general these days.

The album was not mixed in a DJ sense after I had produced the tracks, but composed like that from the beginning. Afterwards I split up the tracks to release them as singles or in the download shops, which only sell individual tracks. I knew that it could be a risk, as the DJs would not be able to play every track. But, basically, I do not think about the financial aspects when I want to do something.

At the moment I can't say if I will do another artist album this way, as the fact that each song leads into the next one made the production truly time consuming. Nevertheless I will continue to release mixed CDs for sure.

The digital format also means you can endless cut and recut music and make more project. We saw that with Uniting Music and the various remix projects, the Uniting Summer EP, etc. Would that be possible if you were still trafficking only in vinyl?

Maybe it would not have been possible. The investment for a digital release is by far lower than the one for a physical. This allows you to risk a release which you might not do, if you have to recoup a vinyl pressing. However the main reason to put out the EPs was that the tracks hadn't been available in a DJ-friendly single track format before.

Of course today's technology offers possibilities which haven't been there before and help a lot. You can do productions with a computer and a bit of software for few thousand dollars. Equipment to do some re-edits is even cheaper. But it really depends on what kind of music you want to produce and what kind of result you expect. If you use live recordings in your tracks and try to achieve a high-class sound, you still need a good sounding recording room, good microphones, pre-amps, compressors and so on, which is still expensive. And a lot of the vintage instruments haven't gotten much cheaper either, but still sound better than their rather affordable plug-in clones.