If you take the time to search things out and build online relationships with people, pretty much everything you want is there at the click of a button and you don't need a heap of cash or contacts to do it. While I'm always going to favour human interaction- a smile and a chat with the guys at Regal Records in Hackney for instance, or a pint with friends after a morning's shopping- and walking out of a store with a big bag of music that I can touch, hold and admire in its endearingly anachronistic physical form, this is actually a democratising move in many ways.
Now instead of hotfooting it down to my local hole-in-the-wall Jamaican record store for the latest pre-releases or ordering them up from, Ernie B's, or Dub Vendor, I'm more likely to grab them from some anonymous guy/girl on a peer-to-peer program. The truth is that I'm trying to find ways to navigate the information along with the rest of you. The reference points have just changed and it's hardly fair for me to stand in any great position of authority right now. However, a quick scan of mixtapes, specialist radio shows, file-sharing platforms such as Soulseek, and the BitTorrent network proves that there's still plenty of new material out there. Much less easy to collect in any meaningful way, the zeroes and ones of downloadable music do not exactly invite the love and obsessive fetishization that vinyl does. After years of releasing more vinyl than anywhere else in the world, Jamaica is moving away from the hard copy format of 7" singles and embracing the digital format. As pointed out in previous columns, this time it's not the drums and melodies that are undergoing the revolutionary effects of technology, but the medium itself. Just as London's Greensleeves label celebrates its 30th birthday with a compilation presciently titled From Dubplate to Download, the industry is going through the kind of shake-up not felt since Prince Jammy unleashed the mighty Sleng Teng riddim on Waltham Park Road in 1985.
Well, it's certainly a funny old time for reggae.
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