By Our Reporter
The Ugandan music industry is evolving at rocket speed and if there is anybody that had a second thought about it a few years ago, his or her mindset must have shifted to the right.
When we talk of such evolution, there are some musicians that deserve a special mention for having played a pivotal role in ensuring that Ugandan music moves to another level, and these include; Chameleone, Bebe Cool, Peter Miles, Juliana, Bobi Wine and others.
However as years go by, things keep changing and therefore the game changes. If one takes a look at the videos that were produced in Uganda 6 years ago, one can tell that indeed there has been a paradigm shift.
Several musicians have embraced new technology and are investing heavily in their music videos to produce more quality work. The likes of Kenzo, Bebe Cool, and Navio are investing over Ugx 50Million in their music videos and the end results have not disappointed them. Navio has for long been frequenting international awards, and lately Kenzo and Bebe Cool.
While musicians like Kenzo and Bebe Cool take the international scene by storm, their counterpart, the legendary Jose Chameleone seems to have stagnated. Chameleone’s stagnation is partly blamed on his sticking to low budget videos.
The highest video in Uganda is being shot at approximately Ugx10M, and on this amount the best the video maker can get you is a 6k quality camera as produced by cameras like red Dragon, Sony NFS, Arris etc.
With the industry still developing, some of the makers cannot fully exploit the capabilities of these machines and therefore the results are always a bit lacking.
This is where the difference is, Chameleone set the trend when he decided to redo the Gimme Gimme video abroad. It’s then that Bebe got the light for quality videos followed by Kenzo and the two have not looked back. Its rumored that the 2 videos that Chameleone reproduced abroad were sponsored by the Nigerian singer Davido that was much in need of a collabo with him and that was among his terms. Shortly after, the singer went back to his old ways of 5M videos.
We love him but he needs to do more quality videos if he’s to keep up with the level of competition on the continent.
Take an example, “For you” is a wonderful song that has been on the airwaves for months now but it has no video yet. It has been established that the singer is planing to use Jah Live to do the video. Not that we despise our own, but it’s time he looked to widely esteemed African producers like Godfather or Clarence Peters.