By Tim Quirk
Reanno Gordon has been making records for more than twenty years, and their breadth is substantial. He deejays and he sings, frequently inside the same bar, and he's been doing it across Dancehall, Roots, R&B, EDM and Pop features without ever sounding anything but natural. On August 6th the Jamaican government gave him the Reggae Icon Award at Grand Gala, alongside Wayne Wonder. He is, by any reasonable measure, one of the most important voices in Jamaican music.
He is also an artist who built that career one song at a time.
Dancehall has never really run on album cycles. It runs on riddims and singles and features and versions, on records that come out when they're finished rather than when an A&R guy says it's time. Busy has released music through more labels than I can list, kept control of a great deal of it, and never waited around for permission.
Which means when I explained that Tapedeck believes a penny per play should be a floor not a ceiling, lets rights holders set their own prices, encourages fans to pay even more than that, and hands over 80% of every dollar a fan spends to the artist, he didn't hesitate to jump on board and become Tapedeck's brand ambassador.
As part of that, he'll be licensing us ten exclusive tracks — five arriving in the coming days, and five more over the coming year, each one available only on Tapedeck for three months before it publishes anywhere else – along with the catalog he controls. And he'll be the face of our push in Jamaica and across the diaspora this fall, starting with the Android rollout that's begun today and building toward a workshop and launch event at Tuff Gong in Kingston on October 1st.
Every new user who downloads Tapedeck starts with 50 free plays, and artists such as Busy Signal get paid in full for all of them, because Zedge eats that as a user acquisition cost. Every free tier in the history of this business has been financed by paying artists less; ours isn't.
On that first call, when Busy found out I'm also a musician, he suggested we collaborate. I assumed he was being polite, because it's easy to be generous on a phone call. But a few days later we were talking about the myriad genres he's worked in, and how it might be possible to wind up with a different Busy Signal track on every genre page in Tapedeck. So I sent him an outtake from the sessions my band Wonderlick did in Floyd, Virginia with a bunch of old time musicians earlier this year. The song was called "No More Horse." My musical partner Jay and I had had high hopes for it, but the final mix didn't quite come together the way we'd hoped, so we left it off the album.
But I figured a folk-punk song might be a decent "try any genre" challenge for Busy, and I was curious to see what happened.
What happened is he sent back a guest verse that made the song better than it was, and finally feel complete – suddenly, it belonged on the full album. I've been listening to it for two weeks and I still grin like an idiot when we get to his "Hee aww!" entrance.
The song comes out later this month. Busy is credited as a co-writer and takes 50% of the master and 50% of the publishing, which is not a normal deal for a guest verse and is not something he requested. But Tapedeck is all about compensating artists fairly, so I insisted we split any proceeds equally in that spirit.
Tapedeck is on Android today. Busy's exclusives are coming. So is "No More Horse."
Come find us at Tuff Gong on October 1st.