By Brent Pin­heiro

BAS­SETERRE, St Kitts,

Hours be­fore the first act took the stage at the 28th edi­tion of the St Kitts Mu­sic Fes­ti­val, Ba­jan so­ca artiste Ed­win Year­wood urged Caribbean peo­ple to sup­port Caribbean artistes, say­ing greater pub­lic back­ing is crit­i­cal to the genre’s growth.

Speak­ing at a news con­fer­ence to in­tro­duce the artistes set to per­form at Thurs­day night’s open­ing show, Year­wood lament­ed the low al­bum sales Caribbean artistes con­tin­ue to ex­pe­ri­ence de­spite the re­gion’s pop­u­la­tion.

“Num­bers mat­ter in many ways, es­pe­cial­ly mu­sic sales. To me, it’s al­most as if some of us are afraid to make Machel or Voice a mil­lion­aire,” he said.

“We’ve been around for a long time and there’s no way that Machel Mon­tano shouldn’t have had two or three mil­lion sales.”

Year­wood ar­gued that greater sup­port for Caribbean artistes would make so­ca hard­er to ig­nore, par­tic­u­lar­ly by or­gan­i­sa­tions such as the Record­ing Acad­e­my, which over­sees the Gram­my Awards.

So­ca star Machel Mon­tano agreed, say­ing dis­cus­sions about cre­at­ing a ded­i­cat­ed Gram­my cat­e­go­ry for so­ca have been on­go­ing, but suc­cess de­pends on un­der­stand­ing how the sys­tem works.

He said peo­ple with­in the genre need to be­come mem­bers of the Record­ing Acad­e­my and par­tic­i­pate in the vot­ing process.

The Gram­mys do not cur­rent­ly have a ded­i­cat­ed so­ca cat­e­go­ry. In­stead, so­ca artistes com­pete in the Best Glob­al Mu­sic cat­e­go­ry.

Mon­tano al­so stressed the im­por­tance of au­di­ence growth and stream­ing num­bers in help­ing the genre gain greater recog­ni­tion.

“If we watch over the years, just with the in­tro­duc­tion of stream­ing like Spo­ti­fy and YouTube, so­ca mu­sic has grown in its po­ten­tial to reach num­bers. There have been in­creased lev­els of songs on YouTube that hit a mil­lion views in less and less and less time. So it means that we are be­ing con­sumed more. Spo­ti­fy, Ap­ple Mu­sic, those things will all con­tribute. I think we just have to keep on the tra­jec­to­ry.”

Mon­tano will per­form along­side sev­er­al so­ca stars at the fes­ti­val, in­clud­ing Voice, V’ghn, Ed­win Year­wood and Kros­fyah, and Bran­don.

Thou­sands of pa­trons are ex­pect­ed to at­tend the three-day event at Warn­er Park Sport­ing Com­plex in Bas­seterre this week­end.

Pho­to cap­tion: So­ca artiste Machel Mon­tano ad­dress­es of­fi­cials and mem­bers of the me­dia on day one of his he St Kitts Mu­sic Fes­ti­val press con­fer­ence.