Shaggy, Sharon Burke, Judith Bodley To Stage ‘Island Music Conference’ In February

Mr. Boombastic Shaggy says he will be teaming up with Solid Agency’s Sharon Burke and broadcaster/media manager Judith Bodley to stage a music symposium titled Island Music Conference, next February, which is celebrated as Reggae Month in Jamaica.

According to the diamond-selling artist, the collaborative effort will be aimed at assisting Jamaican musicians to become au fait with the “business of music”, especially in light of the fact that Jamaican genres appear to be lagging behind Afrobeats, Reggaeton, and other offshoots of Dancehall.

“That is why Sharon and I and Judy have decided to do that.  We did some other ones before, and this is the new one that we have branded and we are doing it properly,” Shaggy told Television Jamaica’s Anthony Miller in a recent interview.

“And I want to bring some of my friends, people who I deal with the head of some of these companies – bring them down to Jamaica, whosever can come and who can zoom, and just let people learn.  It don’t cost yuh fi di knowledge; just come een an jus learn, and draw your own conclusion and then see me there, or anybody that I have brought there that can throw your questions to them and learn,” Shaggy explained.

Shaggy’s conference announcement comes almost two years after he called for the reform of the music business in Jamaica in an Onstage interview.

It also comes a year after he advised his Jamaican musical compatriots to focus more on making records that can be utilized in music synchronization, since these have the potential to generate even greater wealth for them, as these can be used within movies, television shows, television and radio commercials, and video games.

Shaggy also, at the time, had emphasized the importance of artists being well-prepared when going to the studio and spending time to ensure songs are strong and well-written.

In April 2020 interview with The Voice Online, Shaggy had said that Dancehall was in a state of crisis.  He pointed out that many Dancehall artists have more followers than streaming numbers, “because they have become somewhat of a side show”.

Shaggy had also highlighted the fact that Dancehall music has the lowest streaming numbers of all other genres in its class. Compared to Reggaeton and Afrobeat, which are both the ‘birth child’ of dancehall as well as Hip-hop, which is the ‘birth child’ of Reggae and dancehall, the Jamaican genre has far less numbers.

He went on to state that international artists such as Ed Sheeran, Rihanna, Drake and Justin Beiber had all sampled and made huge success from 90’s style Dancehall, but that the new generation of deejays had taken the ‘dance’ out of dancehall, making it now “singhall”, and the club scene a place where “people standing around, drinking and smoking, sing  a couple lines from a song and wave their hands in the air.”