Faustuss International's Ethical Agenda

Faustuss International believes in and stands for:

the ethical promotion and production of good music and musicians worldwide;

a music industry that puts the artist first;

diversity, creativity, individuality and freedom of expression in music.

Faustuss International was founded in order to address a number of problems that exist in the global music industry by recording, producing and promoting music and musicians from around the world.

Faustuss works on a 100% ethical basis. All artists who work with us are guaranteed a fair cut of whatever profit is made from the sale of their music. Full details of exactly what each artist receives are readily available, but as a general guidline the profits are divided as follows:

    • 40% direct to the artist
    • 45% to projects in their local communities. These vary from group to group and can be schools, AIDS awareness projects, or cultural centres.
    • 15% to Faustuss in order to cover operating costs and help fund future work.

Despite this, we do not want to be labelled as a charity. We are a company who do business the way business should be done...FAIRLY. If all businesses were run this way, we would be well on the way to a world that did not need charity.

During the time we spent making recordings in Kenya, it became apparent that people were becoming dissatisfied and restless with the approach to'development' that has been adopted by many Western organisations.

    • People do not want to rely on handouts, preferring to retain their dignity and create ways of providing for themselves.

    • Moreover, many are becoming aware of the dangers presented by much of the conditional 'aid' that is fast becoming a standard in corporate 'philanthropy'.

    • People value their culture. They are no longer happy to be forced to act out accelerated parodies of the development of the EU or the US, not least because many of them are suffering as a result of these clumsy and unthinking methods.

    • We do respect the culture and traditions of everyone we work with.

    • We do approach under-funded, under-recognised musicians, in order to offer them a chance to record their music.

    • We do give every musician we work with a fair deal.

    • We do try to ensure that the music they make also benefits their local communities.

    • We do not provide training in new industrial skills for the rural unemployed.

    • We do not build pointlessly extravagant places of worship in localities where people can't even afford to thatch their own mud huts.

    • We do not build western toilet cubicles in villages that have perfectly good pit toilets, where the money would be far better spent on books, health education, medicine etc etc.

    • We do not offer support to communities in a way that is dependent on the submission to or adoption of any religious or cultural ideal.

    • We do not hand out money to the poor, so as to give even more weight to the common perception that everybody from the West has more of it than we know what to do with.

Please contact us for more information on our projects and policies.