Global Reggae Charts - Issue #8 / December 2017

global reggae charts
featured artist
authors, directors, photographers, designers, and
entrepreneurs, with the goal to unify, mentor, spark
inspiration, build together, and provide a platform to
showcase their works.”
The word platform in particular caught my attention.
Hold that in mind as we’ll come back to it. But before
we do, allow me a little excursion into the business
of reggae.
Reggae, as much as we love it, is best described
as a niche genre. Arguably one of the best known,
globally beloved, and most musically influential genres
- but a niche one nonetheless. Over the decades,
a few superstar artists emerged from reggae and
managed to gain the attention of mainstream audiences.
But overall, most artists which we consider “big”
within the reggae scene are far away from the kind of
stardom and commercial results associated with the
term superstar.
simply very challenging and expensive to organize
an effective global media outreach; especially from
an island suffering from poverty. Thus, it mostly
didn’t happen as there simply weren’t enough
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resources .
Today, however, the rules of the game have changed.
And the young generation of reggae artists is learning
to make the best of those changes.
The internet transformed the world of music, as well
as its business, on many levels. For one, every artist
can reach his fanbase directly, thanks to
One reason for that certainly is the fact that the
public’s taste changes and evolves over time. This
correlates with the media’s willingness to feature
reggae. At a few points over the past 40 years, general-interest
music media made room for reggae and/
or dancehall artists. More often than not, however,
they didn’t. Yet, I contend that the latter isn’t only due
to the zeitgeist.
Back when the media was still the major gatekeeper,
the relationship between the public’s taste and the
media’s content worked two ways: the media covered
something if they believed their audience would
like it. At the same time, the people could only like
what they knew; which in turn was largely driven by
the media. This means: the ability to - beware, industry
slang - “work the media” was just as crucial for
an artist as the music they produced. Over an endured
stretch of time, I argue, reggae artists and their
teams, weren’t particularly successful at this.
This isn’t meant as finger-pointing. The reasons for
that situation were plentiful and all too understandable,
particularly when it comes to Jamaican artists.
In the pre-internet world and music business, it was
Protoje
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global reggae charts | issue 8 / dec 2017