Minister responsible for Culture and youth Affairs Justina Charles has made calls for local musicians to work together to push Dominican music internationally.
She made the comments while addressing the launch of a new band Ncore, formerly MFR at the Flamboyant Hotel, on Monday.
Charles said that while the government is engaging in efforts to support the industry much of the work lies in the hands of artists if there is to be success.
One of her key recommendations was that musicians should give greater attention to marketing and copyrighting their material.
“To maximize economic benefit from the cultural industry from our music, such as bouyon, there is need to give greater attention to marketing and copyright. Our musicians, producers and entrepreneurs need to find ways to work together to market our music to the Caribbean, North America, and beyond,” she said.
“On the matter of copyright, as musicians you need to ensure is copyrighted. Royalties generated by copyrighted music accounts for millions of dollars worldwide. Royalties are just another set of income which you must take advantage of,” she continued.
The minister cited piracy as one of the major challenges hindering local and international musicians success.
“Undermining your efforts however, and economic benefit to be derived from the cultural industry as a whole is the plague of piracy. Developments in technology make piracy even easier. At the same time, such developments make piracy much harder to contain. This is why the Ministry of Culture and government have taken legislative action to address this issue,” she said.
“The general public, event organizers and others in the hospitality industry have difficulty with adhering to copyright legislation and in particular, the payment of fees for the use of music. It is grossly unfair of everyone else in the entertainment chain gets paid except the musician-the ones who actually produce the music,”
The minister believes that public awareness in essential in this area. She assured moreover, that her ministry commits itself to working with musicians and other relevant stakeholders to develop a program of public awareness on the issue of intellectual property and copyright.
She mentioned the government’s strengthening of copyright legislation by passing the Copyright Act of 2003 as another way in which the matter is being addressed.
“We have adopted a national export strategy for the period 2009-2013 which includes a section on cultural industries. It proposes a range of strategy to boost export of cultural goods and services and we have continued to provide duty free incentives on musical and audio visual equipment and maintained low import duty on computers,” she said.
She also mentioned a $1 million stimulus which was set aside to aid in the entertainment industry in the last national budget.
She is convinced that while all this is done, there is much to do. She gave a guarantee that the ministry will continue to engage in dialogue with musicians and other stakeholders in the industry to find ways to provide additional support and create a more enabling environment for growth.
She said however, “You musicians, others in the cultural industry are literally the key players and must play your part …I issue a challenge …to all our musicians and others in the cultural industries sector, to aim for the highest standard of excellence, and originality. As musicians you need to study the music business become familiar with issues of copyright study the market out there keep up with the latest development in technology and production values,” she pointed out.
First off, the Minister responsible for Culture and youth Affairs Justina Charles needs to be complemented for attending such an event like this and so are the promoters for organizing such an event. I noticed the main theme in the Minister address to the Musician was about copyright and piracy legislation which is all good, we know the effects this can have on the lively-hood of Musicians, there is no doubt about that, but at the end of the day it is the Musicians themselves who are the ones to take their craft and profession seriously and this involves hours of practice, reading and studying the business, goal setting staying focus. belief in self, perseverance and faith and their association with whom they surround themselves with. The successful Musicians you see today, we must always remember their success did no just happened overnight. there were certain things that they did which lead to their success..
The Musicians need to realize that the music they produce and make should be treated as a commodity or product and if it is to be consumed or bought weather locally and Internationally it must be of a high quality. Them comes marketing, and distribution, business aspect, that is what determines breakthrough or failure and this is one of the main problems facing all musicians. Let us be honest, it does not matter how talented a Musician is, if he cannot get his music out there for people to consume and
listen then what he produces is kind of useless and fruitless income wise, just like someone making a product and not being able to get it to the final destination, the consumer, then that product is useless, it does not matter how well the product is made, bottom line marketing and distribution..
I noticed that the Minister highlighted some incentives that are available to Musicians, money wise, (one million Dollars) . I hope that this was not just lip service, and if this is so,t then this should be looked at as a sign by the Government showing commitment and seeing the importance that music plays in a Country’s development in terms of marketing the Country, let us not forget the saying music is the international language. Finally we to as Dominicans have to give support to our musicians that is were it starts showing our support to them, let us not forget that.
Yes, piracy isn’t always as bad as some make it out to be, but here in Dominica when artists depend on the “side-of-the-road” sale of their CD’s to survive… yes piracy is definitely an issue. In my opinion, all your other points are correct though.
Bouyon, however, has a long way to go. Cleaner lyrics, better melodies, stronger arrangement and sequencing, authenticity – these all go hand in hand to create a sound that listeners who aren’t Dominican can relate to and enjoy. Musicians and producers will have to make the sacrifice and invest in themselves to master the emerging technologies and learn the necessary skills to bring Dominican music to an international standard.
To be honest, some (very few considering the number of songs released) songs from this Carnival season and the last have met a regional production standard in terms of audio/recording quality that I think we should be proud of. As a member of the industry myself, I am certain that songs out of St. Lucia, Barbados, and even Trinidad (in some instances) are NOT of a better audio/recording quality. Content is another story though…
Further, we should not only focus on bouyon – well established genres such as reggae can be vehicles for multi-talented producers, musicians and artists. For example, a well-received reggae song can create numerous opportunities for the singer even though her usual style is bouyon or cadence. She can then use her 15 minutes of fame (hopefully she will have 15 years of fame) to showcase our native genres, our country and herself.
That is My2Sense
Must congratulate these guy for being here again
Just want to give my perspective about piracy. 1 piracy makes good economic sense when come to marketing because piracy serves as marketing catalyst and will continue to place firms in a highly competitive environment especially the music industry and propels innovation. 2. Piracy has and will continue to pioneer the use of the available technology and creativity.3 Piracy help to provide valuable marketing insight and leads to new market creation. It must not go unnoticed that the key factor that propels innovation in the era of digitalized goods is the difference of quality between the primary and pirated copy. It is known fact that the quality of the pirated copy is usually lower than the original one and this prevents the sales to collapse because consumers are still willing to pay to get better quality.4.The important thing about piracy is that it help to meet the customers when businesses leave them halfway maybe because of unfriendly pricing. Would like to explain but space might be limited. All in all piracy is not always as bad as we may think.
On another note I firmly believe that if we are to market our music especially the so called bouyon music we need to re-brand this music. We need to revisit the lyrics and message that is being propagated. How do we distinguish between one band and the other when they all have the same tune, beat or whatever it is. We should pay close attention to how Trinidad is using the same beats to boost soca music in a harmonious manner without propagating vulgar action ……… much to be said but I’ll stop here.
A lot of fancy words in order to try and justify taking what is not yours to take: PIRACY =:”The use or reproduction of another’s work without permission” (the Oxford dictionary). In plain language:”stealing”!. Don’t you come and pirate my mangoes with the justification that you are helping me to market them. I’ll have your nuts as recompense.
My friend do you think you can get IPR for mangoes? Even you do, are you trying to say that it would be morally and ethically right to stifle economic growth and innovation by withholding your knowledge to yourself? Are you also saying that if someone comes up with a medicine for HIV/AIDS he should only keep the recipe to himself when millions of human are dying daily? What you need to understand is that the choices we make and to make them well we must recognize that they are part of what is fundamentally a social and political choice “a choice of how to be free, equal, productive human beings under a new set of technological and economic condition.” This is where again I firmly believe that piracy inspires us to be innovative, creative and meet the audience or customers where business does not cater for them. In the words of Thomas Jefferson, he said, “he who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine: as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. Ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the morale and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have peculiarly and benevolently design by nature when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. This truth is becoming apparent as the developed world move rapidly towards a knowledge economy, in which values derives not from ownership and utilization of hard physical assets, but from the processing and interpretation of information. Where as physical assets allows strait forward protection due to its tangibility and excludability idea assets are different. Access to knowledge should be seen as a fundamental human right the same as it is to education and health care, knowledge is a basic necessity of life that should be freely available to all. Therefore, any public good like education (in this case music) for instance, could help us to understand also that an invention or innovation is a social product originated in the shared knowledge of mankind and no one could be regarded as the absolute owner of them; therefore, restriction or benefit on the use of available knowledge should not be claimed in an exclusive manner.
IF you want more reason on the good side of piracy you can leave your email.
I disagree. I think competition among musicians would improve on the talents of the musicians, coming together would limit their creativity.
Couldn’t agree with you more Hugo Grotius………
Hugo and barlty, both of you mis interpreted the vast amount of knowldge the minister gave about the improvement of Dominica music internationally. You all are caught up with the statement saying that the the musians should come together as one. She did not say that.
That is just utter nonsensical thinking from you. Competition is great, as you stated to improve the creativity from the musicians. At the same time it limits their ability to promote and market the music as a whole.