Trending in Dancehall News: Could a Jamaican artist sell Platinum in the Caribbean?
Nigel Staff, a record producer/songwriter and member of the Ruff Cut band, thinks the Jamaican Music industry made a mistake in not taking advantage of the Caribbean marketplace. According to Staff, many singers and DJs need to take advantage of the opportunity to sell gold or Platinum. The record producer revealed this in an interview with veteran broadcaster Nikki Z on Bridge FM.
The music producer said about 44 million people live in the Caribbean. Yet, as a marketplace for our music, it is mostly untouched. Instead, our singers and DJs are laser focus on the United States, where the market is crowded with many genres of music, and the competition is stiff.
To justify his argument, Staff said:
“I think we’ve never created a marketplace for ourselves. So in the Caribbean, we could be selling millions of records and certifying ourselves as genuinely Platinum on any format, whether it’s streams, vinyl, or CDs. We’ve never done that,” Staff said.
“What we’ve done was to tap into another culture or country’s marketplace, which is the US, which is the UK. So if we are really about doing that, we need to know those rules, but we’ve never sought to know those rules. So we cuss about the Grammys every January and February, and we don’t know how it works. We talk about going on the Billboard charts, and we don’t understand what it means,” he added.
Nigel Staff, Ruff Cut Band
DancehallMag seems to agree with Staff; it referenced an interview the chairman of the Jamaica Reggae Industry Association, Ibo Cooper, gave the Gleaner in 2016. Cooper said most Jamaican music sales were painfully low compared to North American artists. Therefore, Caribbean artists should endeavor to transform the Caribbean and Africa into profitable markets for Caribbean music.
No one can deny that sales are a problem for Jamaican music. However, if you pay attention to Billboard sales for a typical Reggae album, it’s very rear the numbers exceed 2,000. No wonder the Grammy has removed Dancehall as a genre.
Low sales are definitely a big problem for Jamaican music. And we must do everything in our power to fix the problem.