Creatives body seeking online earnings for artistes

The Barbados Association of Creatives and Artistes (BACA) has declared it wants to see greater effort in helping artistes monetise their works on online platforms.

With the formal media launch of the Crop Over Festival last week, and the ICC T20 World Cup set for June, artistes were enthusiastic and looked forward to what the season has in store for them, the association’s president, Charles Lewis, told Barbados TODAY.

He said: “I’m glad to say that we had a meeting with NCF [National Cultural Foundation] last week and went through all of our concerns, and was assured that they would be [dealt with], so everything is prepared so far. We are looking forward to Crop Over.

“As far as the World Cup, I am also hoping that we will be included because again, I wrote to the organisers and I’ve not received any responses yet with regards to including members of our association in whatever they were planning.”

Tent manager Sharon Carew-White. (FP)

The association was this year focused on helping artistes monetise their works online, something that performers have not been able to fully capitalise on for some time, Lewis added.

“We had a meeting with an organisation here just on Wednesday, and that was one of the topics that was dealt with,” he said. “The difficulties that most of the local artistes are having to receive remuneration from YouTube and some of the other online [platforms]. There are a number of things that are in the works, and again I can only be hopeful that in the next few months we will see an ease where that is concerned; something that would encourage more local content to be online.”

The C.O. Williams House of Soca calypso tent’s manager, Sharon Carew-White took a different approach to the online format. She said artistes have not reaped the full benefits of having their works online owing to a lack of buying interest and a culture of consuming content.

“What we have to do is educate our artistes outside of the soca or bashment artistes, like the calypsonians to upload their music so that it can reach a wider demographic. I think in our entire region, we don’t buy music really per se like that. 

“Americans buy because you got to commute from A to B; you will buy music on your phone or whatever device you have. We does juck in a memory stick or some sort of flash drive and we good with that. To me, it’s about educating not only the artistes but [citizens] as well.” (SB)