Music exec urges greater focus on streaming

Chief executive officer of Pop Style Music, Julian Jones-Griffith, said Spotify has had some impact on the local market, but that real success depends on the artistes and their teams.

“I see Jamaica in the top 10 pretty much across the board. The numbers are still low relatively speaking, but it’s all about growth, and it’s just for us to play our part to educate the artistes and consumers to support streaming,” he told THE STAR.

Jones-Griffith continued, “I wasn’t expecting it to have any immediate or huge impact because streaming – as a way of listening to music – requires a culture shift from consumers in the Caribbean and that takes time, as well as other factors such as the required paid subscription. It being available here to me, means that a shift can start to happen no matter how small the steps.”

Currently, the bulk of the revenue generated by music is almost 80 per cent catalogue music. The collection of hit songs Jamaica has seen over the decades will naturally benefit with this significant percentage he said but there needs to be more opportunities for the younger, upcoming acts, said the popular music industry executive and artiste manager.

When Spotify made its service available to Jamaica exactly a year ago, it said that its plan was to “work closely with local creators and its partners in each market to provide a customised experience that meets the unique needs”.

Jones-Griffith is of the view that while strides have been made, the local music industry needs to be doing more in order to benefit from the popular music streaming service.

“It appears that the number of artistes and teams have a focus on Spotify and other digital streaming [providers] (DSPs) is way too small. It’s left to distributors to try and place songs on playlists and promote the links when all of us should include Spotify, Pandora and Apple Music, in our release plans in a much bigger way,” he said.

“An artiste’s following should be just as important to them as those on social media but it doesn’t get the same amount of attention and promotion from us and that’s an easy change to make. Then, and only then, will the major shift happen – it will also have an impact changing the culture of music consumption across the Caribbean and see which DSPs are important to us.”

With TikTok’s increasing popularity, artistes are beginning to see the movement of songs based on the trends on the platform. Laa Lee is an example of one dancehall deejay who has seen the impact of his songs trending on TikTok, in his Spotify streams.

Another is Marksman, whose track Verified Choppa started off trending on YouTube then it had more than 40,000 videos on TikTok. Last week it was the number one trending viral song on UK Spotify and it has more than two million streams on Spotify.

Jones-Griffith explained that for artistes who were projected to explode on the international scene, “they aren’t going to make or break on Spotify being available in the Caribbean” and this is owed to them having the support of big record or management labels.

“They aren’t always reliant on Spotify to produce big numbers. They have major label machines behind them that can shoehorn them on to the mainstream playlists and placements they need or spend the digital advertising dollars. In my opinion, they pretty much have the core fanbase in pocket already so for them it’s less impactful,” he said.