Global Reggae Charts - Issue #10 / February 2018

Reggae Careers
in the Internet Age
Part I: A New Playground
Text: Thomas Euler // whagwaan-magazine.de
The internet has fundamentally changed music. In
2018, that’s hardly a provocative statement. Distribution
has gone digital. First, MP3s changed everything,
and now we are witnessing the transition from
files to streaming. Marketing has gone digital. Social
Media is now the main way for artists to reach their
fans. And discovery - the way people look for or
stumble across new artists and songs - has also gone
digital. New songs appear in our feeds, are recommended
by curators or introduced to the streaming
services playlists. By and large, the world of music
has become a digital playground.
Along with the changes in the industry, another thing
has fundamentally changed: careers. Before the
internet, the major objective for any aspiring artist
was to convince some institutional gatekeepers. For
most, that used to be a steady grind. You played gigs
at the local youth center and, from time to time, you
landed a slot in some line-up of an event in the next
town. You scrounged up some money to afford some
time at the local studio. You recorded a few songs
which you put on a demo tape. You sent your demo
to some labels and bookers in further-away towns.
You played small gigs in a radius of, maybe, a few
hundred miles. If you got lucky, someone actually
picked up your demo, gave it a shot, amd some
small label handed you a contract and an advance.
This allowed you to record at a better studio. Maybe
something even got published. If no label responded,
you took the money that you earned by playing gigs
and paid for a better studio yourself. You produced a
higher-quality demo and sent it to more labels.
This process basically repeated until someone more
or less important in the industry “discovered” you
and gave you an opportunity to reach a broader audience.
Because, back then, the world of music was
full of gatekeepers: label A&Rs, radio programmers,
TV editors, bookers, and the like. In the age of mass
media, those were the ones controlling the platforms
which artists relied upon if they wanted to reach a
broader-than-local audience. Unless you got really lucky
and instantly won some pop label’s casting, you
usually had a fair amount of experience under your
belt before you got discovered. While you weren’t
dealing with the industry’s big players, you at least
cut your teeth.
Sure enough, this has entirely changed today. From
music production - nowadays comfortably done from
within your bedroom in the DAW of your choice - to
even shooting a music video: never has production
been as affordable and accessible for everyone as it
is now in the digital age. But production is only one
side of the equation; and, arguably, the less important
one. The real game changer is distribution. All
it takes today to release a piece of music is a digital
file, an internet connection, and an account on
YouTube or SoundCloud. Once it’s online, almost half
the world’s population, namely its 3.58 billion global
internet users, can access it. No approval by any
institutional gatekeeper required.
Of course, most music on the web never actually
reaches even a ten-thousandth of that potential audience.
These days, content is ubiquitous and human
attention scarce. But make no mistake. The sheer
possibility of a song turning into a viral sensation or
of an unsigned artist getting a significant hype on social
media is a fundamental change in music’s inner
workings. The gatekeepers of old were often - and in
many cases rightfully - blamed for not taking risks
and only featuring consensus, mainstream-compatible
artists. Today, their influence has dwindled.
They have been replaced by a combination of crowd
global reggae charts | issue 10 / feb 2018 4