Easy vibes, good beats and a celebration of reggae culture starts off the year of music at the Queen Mary as it sails into the second year of its partnership with concert giant Goldenvoice.

The 2019 concert season at the ship begins with the return of the One Love Cali Reggae Fest, which expands to three days as it takes over the Queen Mary Events Park in Long Beach Feb. 8-10.

It’s the first of what’s expected to be several mini-festivals at the 15,000-person capacity venue this year produced by Goldenvoice, which announced a partnership with Urban Commons, the ship’s leaseholder, in late 2017 to put on more large-scale music festivals at the ship .

And they delivered by bringing several ew concerts and taking over some of the existing festivals in 2018 like One Love Cali Reggae Fest.

This year the reggae fest feature more than 50 bands performing throughout the weekend including well known headliners such as Rebelution, Slightly Stoopid and Sublime with Rome.

But with so many acts it would be easy to miss some of the artists that are either up-and-coming or have flown under the radar and may not be as well-known as the headliners.

So One Love co-promoter and talent buyer Jared Segawa shared his top picks via email for the bands beyond the headliners that you don’t want to miss at the three-day festival.

Read more here: ​https://bit.ly/2GcMXbV

Mitch Santell (Producer) and Scott T. Brown (Co-founder) at One Love Calif Reggae Festj in 2018

But reggae? Oh, it’s deader than Bob Marley. You get the occasional single from one of Marley’s sons, but that could just as easily play on the pop/rock radio stations. In fact, they do. But before that… what? Maxi Priest? UB40? As much as I like the early work of both of those artists, their success was founded mostly on the commercial, rather than the rebel, tip. And the only radio exposure they receive now, if any, is on urban classics and college stations. It’s safe to say that the only real survivor of reggae’s heyday are dreadlocks, which now ironically signify wealth and celebrity, rather than the hairstyle of the oppressed.

Many (most?) people probably can’t recall the position of strength that reggae was in during the early to mid-70s. It was being championed and covered by mainstream artists such as Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones for its unique musical structure — a combination of gospel, jazz, R&B and soul. Its very real outlaw reputation didn’t hurt; many of today’s rappers would curl into the fetal position or head for the mean streets of Beverly Hills if dropped into that era’s slums and shantytowns. The 1972 film The Harder The Come influenced a generation of legitimate bad men, wanna-be gunmen, and singers much the same way Scarface would a decade later. Of course, the soundtrack of the former is legendary and still remains one of the essential single-album documents of the genre.

Reggae, like rock, was birthed from a more folksy tradition, in this case mento and calypso. That gentle, largely acoustic music would give way to ska — a more upbeat, dance-oriented music of the 1950s — in a striking metamorphosis similar to how country, blues, folk and “race” music would deliver rock & roll to the youth culture of America and, eventually, the world. Ska was characterized by its walking bass line and rhythms concentrated on the upbeat. It also brought to bear a much faster tempo which demanded dancing. But trends — and teenagers — often have a short attention span and a desire for something new, and music mythology also points to the very hot temperatures in the Caribbean in the mid-1960s as a dominant factor in the evolution of Jamaican music. The sweltering heat produced a slower tempo for both the musicians, and patrons of dancehall and yard dances, the story goes, and thus rocksteady. Perhaps my favorite era of Jamaican music, rocksteady would sadly be a very short, albeit highly influential, “blip” on Jamaican music’s radar, eventually ceding to what we would know as reggae in the late 1960s and 1970s.

As Rastafarianism, Pan-Africanism and black consciousness started to spread in Jamaica, the music again shifted. Nyabinghi drumming and chants started to work their way into Jamaican music, along with a professed love for the sacred herb of marijuana, a desire for repatriation to Africa and the acceptance of Haile Selassie as the second coming of God on earth. To most Jamaicans, Rastas were the bottom rung of the social ladder, confined to the countryside and ghettos of Kingston. However, their revolutionary beliefs soon infiltrated musicians and the music scene, and the golden age of “roots reggae” was soon underway. A young Bob Marley, along with bandmates Bunny Wailer and Peter Tosh, embraced the movement, growing their locks out, and eventually putting an acceptable — and commercial — face on Jamaica’s ghetto music to Western pop culture.

There were exceptions, of course; Bob Marley and The Wailers, Third World, and The Gladiators were self-contained bands. Marley, of course, would become the biggest reggae star in history, and a cottage industry after his premature death at age 36 of cancer. However, it is worth pointing out that black America never really embraced Bob Marley, or reggae music in general, a fact that, according to Ziggy Marley, the reggae king “had (an) issue with, because he wanted African-Americans to hear his message.” Many might argue that the death of reggae began with the death of its superstar, and it’s true that it would never reach the heights, nor produce as magnetic a presence as Bob Marley. But other things that would change both the music and culture of Jamaica were already underfoot.

Read more here: https://bit.ly/2R0ahuz​

Tim Ingham, Founder • MBW

Music Business World-Wide

​Today’s entertainment market is increasingly global. The music industry risks hampering its future potential by thinking too local, too often.

Music Business Worldwide (MBW) is a free, in-depth news, insight and analysis platform for the international music industry.

Whether it’s the colossal US, UK and EU markets, the growing power of Asia-Pacific, Russia and Latin America or the streaming-savvy Nordics, MBW helps artists, managers and music industry rights-holders arm themselves with international knowledge to tackle international ambitions.

Below, a handful MBW subscribers tell us why they read our newsletter and website each day.

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Minneapolis Central Library opens vinyl listening room to share collection

The library hosted the first event in its new "Vinyl Revival" series, which aims to bring attention to the thriving audio format. 


Right now, thousands of vinyl records are stored in the third floor of the Minneapolis Central Library downtown.

They’re not easy to find — the stacks are in a remote room, far from where patrons usually look for books, CDs and movies. But librarians are now beginning to bring the collection out, little by little, to the public.


On Saturday, the library hosted the first event in its new “Vinyl Revival” series, which aims to bring attention to the thriving audio format. Through June, artists will present vinyl-themed programming and curate records from the library’s stacks, many of which are the works of local musicians.


The library also converted a small meeting room on the third floor into a listening room equipped with a turntable and headphones, which people can reserve to listen to the artist-selected picks.


“We just wanted to connect people again with the collection, because it was being unused,” said associate librarian Elizabeth Cole. “It just felt like a really great tool for connecting generations.”


The vinyl market has steadily grown over the past decade. Record sales last year went up 15 percent from 2017 to a total 16.8 million sold, according to Billboard magazine. (This is still only a fraction of overall album sales, which are on the decline.)


That interest has been reflected in libraries, as well. The St. Paul Public Library system, for instance, allows people to check out vinyl from its collection.

Read more here: http://strib.mn/2U2qG3r​

The vinyl revival has been breathing new life into phonographic records for more than a decade. And it shows no signs of slowing.

Albums sold on vinyl records saw double-digit sales growth in the US last year, according to a new report by BuzzAngle Music.

(The same goes for the compact audio cassette—which has been dead to me since I received my first Ace of Base CD at age nine.)

Counting a 16.2 percent increase in total album consumption, 2018 was a banner year for on-demand streaming services. But individual song and album sales suffered, falling 28.8 percent and 18.2 percent, respectively.

With the advent of pay-to-play services like Spotify Premium and Apple Music, it’s no wonder digital and physical album sales are dropping like flies. I mean, when was the last time you actually bought a CD?

Read more here: https://bit.ly/2Cuuxza​
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Iration Will Perform at One Love In Long Beach 2019

Goldenvoice announced today that the 2019 iteration of One Love Cali Reggae Festival will bring headliners Slightly Stoopid, Rebelution, Sublime with Rome, Dirty Heads, and more to the Queen Mary Events Park in February 2019.

Now in its fourth year, the three-day festival will take place on Friday, Feb. 8, Saturday, Feb. 9 and Sunday, Feb. 10. This is the third year the festival has taken place at The Queen Mary; it was first held at The Observatory in Santa Ana.

As was the case the past two years, a mix of gloomy weather and energetic performances tend to make for a wet, but well received, multi-day experience based on “unity, music and good vibes”.

Check out the full lineup: Alpha Blondy, Anuhea, Atmosphere, Ballyhoo, Bikini Trill, Collue Buddz, Common Kings, Dirty Heads, Dispatch, Don Carlos, Fiji, Fishbone, Fortunate Youth, Groundation, Hirie, Iration, Israel Vibration, Ital Vibes, Iya Terra, J Boog, Josh Heinrichs, Katastro, Katchafire, Landon McNamara, Lee Scratch Perry, Long Beach Dub All Stars, Mad Caddies, Matisyahu, Mike Love, Mike Pinto, Morgan Heritage, Nattali Rize, Pacific Dub, Passafire, Pepper, Rebelution, Sammy J, Simpkin Project, Slightly Stoopid, SOJA, Stick Figure, Sublime with Rome, The B Foundation, The Expanders, The Expendables, The Green, The Holdup, The Movement, Tomorrow’s Bad Seeds, Trevor Hall, Tribal Seeds, Yellowman.

Read more here: https://bit.ly/2ThESGo​

Etana, whose name translates to ‘the strong one’ in Swahili, emigrated from her native Jamaica to Florida where she went on to join a female R&B trio. The overtly sexual stereotypes of the genre juxtaposed with her ideals, and eventually she returned to Jamaica to create a sound that embodied Rastafarian principles and respect for women. Her 2008 debut album, The Strong One, solidified her signature sound – powerful vocals paired with an eclectic fusion of reggae, soul, jazz, and folk – while remaining committed to sending a positive, spiritual message. Her most recent release, I Rise, was listed amongst World A Reggae’s Top 10 Albums of 2014.

​Born in the Bronx in 1979, the multi-award-winning Tarrus Riley, son of reggae legend Jimmy Riley, was recording music by his early teens. Since the release of his debut album, Challenges, in 2004, the star has exploded onto the music scene with high profile performances at Reggae Sumfest and the Jamaican Jazz and Blues Festival, garnering accolades such as the EME Awards’ 2011 Cultural Artiste of the Year. Despite his rapid rise to fame, Riley has remained committed to his roots, emphasizing that making ‘thought-provoking music about Black consciousness and experience’ is the core of his work, a vision that he supports through commitment to movements like BLAKSOIL, which aim to speak to the consciousness of black women and children.

Formed in Jamaica in 2000, Rootz Underground are a six-piece band whose music, while staying true to the seminal sound of 1970s reggae and the positive message of Rastafari, combines an edgy and organic sound that is all their own. With the release of their studio albums Movement in 2008 and Gravity in 2010, they have toured over 22 countries across the globe and performed at high profile festivals like Jamaica’s Rebel Salute and Reggae Sumfest. Rootz Underground has established itself as a major player on the international reggae scene. Their highly anticipated third studio album, Return of the Righteous Vol. 1, was released in France in March 2015 and will be released globally on June 1 this year.

Read more here: https://bit.ly/2Dg06hG​