MUSIC POTENTIAL

Local musician Stedson “Red Plastic Bag” Wiltshire believes that too many people enter into the music industry completely forgetting that there is a business side to making music.

His comments came during an interview following the conclusion of a press conference at Bagatelle Great House yesterday morning.

“Unfortunately, the structure of our music industry here in Barbados is that most people come into it seeing it as a side thing, something that you do maybe at Crop Over time; you get an idea for a song and you create it and put it out there. A lot of them are caught up with the show side of it and the business side is often ignored,” he said.

“Music is a huge money earner and across the world music is seen as something special and we need to treat it as something special. The reality is that the creative industries will drive the economy in the near future.”

To get music to a point of one of the economic earners for Barbados, the artiste believes that we should model the likes of Puerto Rico and Brazil who stipulate that 80 per cent and 50 per cent of the music played will be their native music.

“I think we need to look at quotas as well here in Barbados, where we make sure that a certain amount of music played on the radio station is Barbadian or Caribbean at least,” he said.

“That would do one of two things – it would leave more money here in Barbados in the pockets of producers and creators in general through royalties that would accrue to them from their rights. Then they would have money to produce more, but if all the money is going out of the country to people producing music outside of the country, then less money stays here.”

The veteran calypsonian also believes that once more Barbadian music is being played on the radio, more persons a going to want to produce their music locally because they would be getting the opportunity to perform live and hear their music on the radio. He noted that this could benefit Barbados on a whole as we tap into the creative industry.