Let us expose them

Groundins

By: Charles H.E. Campbell

I’m very grateful, and accept the invitation of Mr. Vernon Davidson, Editor of Publications, to use my fortnightly column to elucidate issues afflicting the music industry.

Since JaRIA’s meeting last week Monday with the editorial committee of the Jamaica Observer, the issues of reasserting the importance of respecting the artistes’, musicians’, composers’, authors’, publishers’ and producers’ legal right of attribution and royalty payments for musical works, as used in public places and by mass media; Payola and a more balanced and diversified airplay of Jamaican music have generated a lot of other media coverage, especially from the electronic media houses here and abroad.

These are very timely and appropriate, coming out of a very successful Reggae Month this year, in which JaRIA, through its weekly series and Awards show has demonstrated to the world the wide range of music being produced and recorded in Jamaica. It is the feeling of the music industry that payola has had a tremendously debilitating impact on our airplay, generally.

Many of our artistes, song-writers and producers express extreme frustration about the lack of airplay that their product receives on Jamaican radio. While there are notable exceptions, too large a segment of our radio programmes is devoted almost entirely to dancehall music, to the exclusion of other forms of music such as roots reggae and ska.

In previous eras, Jamaican airplay was the gauge which the international media used to know what was happening in our cultural landscape, and this used to have a significant influence on what disc jockeys abroad played on their programmes in their own countries. Unfortunately, since our local airplay has become so restricted, they no longer have this to use as their barometer.

In fact, one has to travel to Asia, Europe, North and South America to hear a better representation of the great music still being produced in our local studios. For some time, there has been a severe disconnect between what we hear on local radio and the vast breadth of music being generated out of our local music industry annually.

The inter-connection between payola, attribution and royalties, therefore, must be addressed at its root. The Broadcast Commission Act needs to be strengthened in order to hold programmes managers of radio stations accountable for how and what music is broadcast on their station. We, in the industry, are calling for a reintroduction of music libraries at all radio stations, so that all new tracks are first submitted, vetted and cleared by these station libraries before they get on air.

Secondly, the act must ensure that playlists are submitted to the library prior to the programme being aired, to prevent the current practice where we hear one reggae track, produced by a colleague DJ, taking up fifteen minutes or more of any one programme. In this way, the immoral behaviour of some of our radio disc jockeys may be mitigated by better monitoring by the management of these stations.

It is time for those of us in the music industry to demand fair play in the media and provide JaRIA with the names and evidence so that we can expose those who are sabotaging the ability of our creators to get their due recognition and earn their royalties and attribution rights.

Email: che.campbell@gmail.com
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Read at: http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/entertainment/Let-us-expose-them-_11000019