We’d love to consider your CD, book, movie, or other item for inclusion in the Dandemutande Catalog if it pertains to the instruments, music, or culture of Zimbabwe or to the traditional music of southern Africa.
To begin, send us an email describing your work. We’ll ask you to send us one sample copy of your work for evaluation:
Paul Novitski – Dandemutande
PO Box 94
Winlaw BC V0G 2J0
Canada
To include your work in the Dandemutande catalog, we’ll want these further bits:
We’ll want the text as true text, not image scans of printed matter. We’ll want the images at a minimum resolution of 72dpi, a minimum width of 175 pixels (but the larger and the higher the resolution the better).
We’ll also need to agree on pricing: how much you’ll sell copies of your work to Dandemutande for, and how much Dandemutande will sell them to the public for.
Dandemutande is an all-volunteer, not-for-profit operation. Like any retailer, Dandemutande buys most items at a wholesale price and sells them to the public for a slightly higher retail price. This profit margin all goes back into Dandemutande, most of it used to buy more inventory for the catalog and a little going toward overhead expenses (web hosting, shipping supplies, and little else). Neither Paul who runs Dandemutande nor Jan and Helen who do the shipping is paid for their time.
In some cases, we don’t mark up the price of items we buy for the catalog. An example of this is CDs from Mhumhi Records. All of the money we get for Mhumhi CDs goes to the record company, who passes it along to the musicians in Zimbabwe. For selected fundraising efforts like Mhumhi, we choose not to add on a markup in order to keep the items affordable and therefore to generate more income for the musicians abroad.
Another example are the Ephat Mujuru recordings Karigamombe and Musiyano. All of the proceeds from the sale of these tapes goes to Ephat’s widow in Zimbabwe.
If you’d like to make a donation to Dandemutande to help defray our expenses, we’d be grateful!
Yes, please let us know if you notice any mistakes or omissions in the Catalog. Keeping it complete is a lot of work, and we can really use the help.
Thanks!
The Dandemutande Catalog is more than just a shopping cart, it’s an historical record of recordings and publications that have been produced in the past but may be unavailable today. In general, we never remove an item from the catalog even when it goes out of print , because we know that people often need to research old recordings.
We’d love to, but:
a) Our time is limited. If you’d like to volunteer some time to Dandemutande, we’d love to get some help producing audio clips for albums that currently lack them.
b) We can’t afford the disk space. Audio files take up room on a computer disk — about 2/3rds of a megabyte for each one-minute clip. Dandemutande pays a monthly fee to keep files on its web host server. For that reason, we try to keep the number of audio clips down to about three per album.
The exception to this space/money constraint is when audio clips for an album are available on another website. We can link to those clips without taking any more space on the Dandemutande server. In that case, we can include as many clips as are available on the net.
Feel free to write to us for more information.