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Death of Vinyl Singles in Jamaica

In Jamaica, seven-inch singles are completely extinct; DJs have ditched their turntables. Will the digital revolution mean the end of traditional reggae? As Dave Stelfox reported on 18 Jan: Reggae's already had one digital revolution. On the night of February 23, 1985, at a packed venue on Waltham Park Road in Kingston, Jamaica, the producer Lloyd "Prince Jammy" James used a soundclash against the Black Scorpio Sound System to unleash the song that changed Jamaican music forever. Wayne Smith's Under Mi Sleng Teng was based on a stripped-down Casio keyboard loop, with a thunderous computerised bassline. It was the first wholly electronic reggae recording, and its distinctive rhythm marked the birth of the style that came to be known as dancehall.
Now Jamaican music is in the midst of a second, further-reaching technological revolution. This time it's not how reggae sounds that's being turned inside out, but how it's being consumed. In a strange anachronism, reggae has long offered groundbreaking music - its experimental impulses explored through roots, dancehall and dub - but for the past two decades that music has been dependent for exposure on what, in most of the rest of the world, is considered the preserve of collectors only: the seven-inch single. For years Jamaica has been the world's most prolific manufacturer of vinyl, with antiquated pressing plants working full tilt to keep up with the warp-speed productivity of Kingston's studio system. However, over the past year fans have noticed a startling drop in the availability of new music on hard-copy formats.
"The reduction in vinyl production in the West Indies has dramatically affected the way I access music," explains the legendary DJ - or selector - David Rodigan, host of the weekly Rodigan's Reggae show on London's Kiss 100 FM. "In a nutshell, vinyl has been eliminated by the people who play the music to the public. The key players - and by that I mean the sound system selectors that people go to see every weekend, who can make or break a song - are no longer dealing with it in any shape or form and have all switched to CD. Now if someone wants to send me a song, they just email it to me as an MP3. This process has been gradual, but it's now absolute."
The slump in vinyl releases actually turns out to be more or less irrelevant to the industry's health on home turf. As Rodigan says: "The domestic Jamaican market for singles has been negligible for quite some time. Turntables are no longer available there and the home audience buys sound system mixtapes and DVDs of live shows and dances instead. Then there's the matter of piracy, meaning that people can now purchase burned CDRs of new music on the streets at a fraction of the price that legitimate releases would command. It's a reflection of the economic realities in Jamaica that the emotional motivations of overseas collectors have for years propped up vinyl manufacture. Particularly in Europe, people still want to own reggae in that form because it helps them connect to the music's original roots and culture. Now that's coming to an end, though."
A better gauge of the health of reggae, however, is the demise of another phenomenon specific to Jamaican music. After recording a new backing track, reggae producers have traditionally asked several different singers to record their own vocal interpretations of the tune - so each could be released, and the producer would be able to make as much money as possible out of each studio session. That process, known as "voicing", was then followed by each version being released as a separate single. The more popular the instrumental proved, the more songs were cut. With each new production averaging around 20 different versions, labels such as London's Greensleeves and New York's VP Records began to collect these songs on individual "riddim albums", a signature format that became pivotal to reggae's international infrastructure - until now.
Dan Kuster, Greensleeves' head of A&R, says things are changing fast. "We've scaled back our release of dancehall riddim albums because they don't sell any more," he says. "Reggae is in a period of transition and the way people consume music has undergone huge shifts lately. It used to be that producers cut test pressings of new music to give to sound systems and radio DJs, then, if the songs received a good reaction, they'd be released as proper singles. Now, with everyone playing from CD, it's much easier and quicker for people to burn a copy of their work and pass it directly to the guy they want to play it.
"It's got to the point that when producers say that a song has been released in Jamaica, they don't actually mean that it's been pressed. They just mean that it's being played. In fact, a vast amount of music never sees a conventional release at all now. While seven-inches have mainly been an export business since the early 1990s, they still functioned as a valuable barometer of a tune's popularity and were difficult to duplicate, too. Now, as soon as a song is in someone's hands it can be copied and sold in Jamaica in days and, thanks to peer-to-peer platforms and certain pirate websites I'd rather not name, all over the rest of the world in a matter of hours. By the time we get to put a riddim album out, everyone has it already, so it's not worthwhile. Also, while the older people who listen to roots reggae may still want to own music, dancehall is pop music with a young audience that, typically, just wants to be able to hear it and is not concerned with being able to hold the actual record."
That is a problem faced by record companies around the world, but its impact on reggae is more immediate. There's no legitimate domestic market - and increasingly there's no international market, either, thanks to illegal downloads. But in Jamaica, it's not the artists who are suffering.
When voicing a riddim, artists are usually paid a flat fee by producers, not royalties, regardless of how well their song sells. Instead they make their fortunes from live performances and the recording of dubplates - custom versions of big hits calling out the name of a specific selector or sound system that are then played at dances or competitive sound clashes. The more in demand the artist or song, the more these dubplates cost, and with professional DJ teams around the world hungry for exclusive tracks, it's a lucrative trade for top-tier performers. It is, in fact, the producers who are finding themselves cut out of reggae's economic loop.
"The people behind the scenes are the ones who are really feeling it," says Jeremy Harding, head of Kingston's 2 Hard record label. "The artists aren't noticing any change at all. They can still get paid well for performing and cutting dubs, but Jamaican producers have always been responsible for generating their own income. It's not like hip-hop, where someone like Timbaland is paid thousands of dollars for a beat. We actually pay people to feature on our music. For a long time producers made their money from singles sales and overseas licensing if a tune got big, but the riddim albums really kept the scene afloat. Now that's finished, people don't know what to do."
Kuster is cautiously optimistic, and takes a pragmatic view of the downturn in Jamaican musical production. "No one wants see this industry in decline," he says. "But the one good thing is that the days of ridiculous amounts of versions of mediocre rhythm tracks are at an end. No one needs 20 versions of one tune because, of those 20 songs, people probably only ever wanted to hear five or six anyway. Now, with fewer voicings being made, a lot of substandard material has been cut out. The way ahead now is to concentrate on the value of individual songs and place emphasis on quality over quantity."
Harding agrees, likening the forces bearing down on reggae to those of natural selection. However, he also sees opportunities for growth. "To get by, people are going to have to be smart," he says. "They will have to take a longer-term view and this can be done by paying attention to things like artist development." As the manager of dancehall superstar Sean Paul and a number of rising producers, including Craig "Leftside" Parks, he speaks with authority. "From now on, we will see music makers looking into alternative revenue streams, investing more heavily in individual performers, building ongoing relationships with them, and crossing over into management roles."
Should any music be able to weather such a storm, it's reggae. If nothing else, its largely informal economy allows it to adapt much faster than the major labels in the US or Europe. In fact, as Harding points out, attitudes and expectations are already beginning to alter on the island. "People are starting to think differently. They're realising that they can't rely on easy money any more and taking steps to change the way they work," he continues. "Whatever happens, though, reggae and dancehall will never go away. This is our culture so, as long as new generations of artists keep coming through and people want to dance to it, it will always have a future."